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MISCELLANEOUS STUDIES 



MISCELLANEOUS 
STUDIES 

A SERIES OF ESSAYS 



BY 

WALTER PATER 

LATE FELLOW OF BRASENOSE COLLEGE 

PREPARED FOR THE PRESS 
BY 

CHARLES L. SHADWELL 

FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE 



ILontion 
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited 

NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1900 

A II rights reserved 



f o oo 



Fii^st published 1895 
Reprinted 1899, 1900 









^ 



PREFACE 



The volume of Greek Studies, issued early in the 
present year, dealt with Mr. Pater's contributions to 
the study of Greek art, mythology, and poetry. The 
present volume has no such unifying principle. Some 
of the papers would naturally find their place along- 
side of those collected in Imaginary Portraits, or in 
Appreciations , or in the Studies in the Renaissance. 
And there is no doubt, in the case of several of them, 
that Mr. Pater, if he had lived, would have subjected 
them to careful revision before allowing them to 
reappear in a permanent form. The task, which he 
left unexecuted, cannot now be taken up by any other 
hand. But it is hoped that students of his writings 
will be glad to possess, in a collected shape, what has 
hitherto only been accessible in the scattered volumes 
of magazines. It is with some hesitation that the 
paper on Diaphaneite , the last in this volume, has 
been added, as the only specimen known to be 
preserved of those early essays of Mr. Pater's, by 
which his literary gifts were first made known to the 
small circle of his Oxford friends. 

Subjoined is a brief chronological list of his pub- 
lished writings. It will be observed how considerable 



vi PREFACE 

a period, 1880 to 1885, was given up to the com- 
position of Marius the Epicurean, the most highly 
finished of all his works, and the expression of his 
deepest thought. 

1866. 

Coleridge. Appeared in Westminster Review, January, 1866. 
Reprinted 1889 in Appreciations, 

1867. 

WiNCKELMANN, Appeared in Westminster Review, January, 
1867. Reprinted 1873 in Studies in the Renaissance. 

1868. 

Aesthetic Poetry. Written in 1868. First published 1889 
in Appreciations. 

i86g. 

Notes on Leonardo da Vinci. Appeared in Fortnightly 
Review in November, 1869. Reprinted 1873 in Studies in 
the Renaissance. 

1870. 

Sandro Botticelli. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in 
August, 1870, entitled *A Fragment on Sandro Botticelli,' 
Reprinted 1S73 in Studies in the Renaissance. 

Pico DELLA Mirandola. Appeared in Fortnightly Review 
in October, 1871. Reprinted in 1873 in Studies in the 
Renaissance. 

Poetry of Michelangelo. Appeared in Fortnightly Review 
in November, 1871. Reprinted in 1873 in Studies in the 
Renaissance. 



PREFACE 



1873. 

Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Published 
1873 by Messrs. Macmillan. Contained : — 

Aucassin a7id Nicolette. Entitled in second and later 

editions, 'Two Early French Stories.' 
Pico della Mirandola. See 1871. 
Sandro Botticelli. See 1870. 
Luca della Robbia, 
Poetry of Michelangelo. See 1871. 
Leonardo da Vinci. See 1869. 
yoachim du Bellay. 
Winckelmann. See 1867. 
Conclusion. 

1874. 

Wordsworth, Appeared in Fortnightly Revieiv in April, 1874. 
Reprinted in 1S89 in Appreciations. 

Measure for Measure. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in 
l^ovember, 1874. Reprinted in 1889 in Appreciations. 

1875- 

Demeter and Persephone. Written as two lectures, and 
delivered in 1875 at the Birmingham and Midland Insti- 
tute. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in January and 
February, 1876. Reprinted in 1895 in Greek Studies. 

1876. 

Romanticism. Appeared in Macmillan^s Magazine in Novem- 
ber, 1876. Reprinted in 1889 in Appreciations under the 
title ' Postscript.' 

A Study of Dionysus. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in 
December, 1876. Reprinted in 1895 in Greek Studies. 



viii PREFACE 



1877. 

The School of Giorgione. Appeared in Fortnightly Review 
in October, 1877. Reprinted in 1888 in third edition of 
77^1? Renaissance. 
The Renaissance : Studies in Art and Poetry. Second 
edition. Messrs. Macmillan. Contained : — 
Two Early French Stories. 
Pico delta Mirandola. 
Sandro Botticelli. 
Luca delta Robbia. 
The Poetry of Michelangelo. 
Leonardo da Vinci, 
yoachim du Bellay. 
Winckelmann. 

187S. 

The Child in the House. Appeared in Macmillan'' s Maga- 

zine in August, 1878, under the heading, ' Imaginary 

Portrait. The Child in the House.' Reprinted by Mr. 

H. Daniel at his private press, Oxford, in 1894. Reprinted 

in 1895 in the present volume. 
Charles Lamb. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in October, 

1878. Reprinted in 1889 in Appreciations. 
Love's Labours Lost. Written in 1878. Appeared in Mac- 

jnillan^s Magazifie in December, 1885. Reprinted in 1889 

in Appreciations. 
The Bacchanals of Euripides. Written in 1878. Appeared 

in Macmillan' s 3Iagazine in May, 1889. Reprinted in 

Tyrrell's edition of the Bacchae in 1892. Reprinted in 

1895 in Greek Studies. 

1880. 

The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture. Appeared in Fort- 
nightly Review in February and March, 1880. Reprinted 
in 1895 in Greek Studies. 



PREFACE ix 

The Marbles of Aegina. Appeared in Fortnightly Review 
in April, 1880. Reprinted in 1895 "^^ Greek Studies. 

1S83. 

Dante Gabriel Rossettl Written in 1883. Published in 
1889 in Appreciations. 

1885. 

Marius the Epicurean. Published in 1885 by Messrs. Mac- 
millan. Two volumes. 

A Prince of Court Painters. Appeared in Macmillan's 
Magazine in October, 1885. Reprinted in 1887 in Imagi- 
nary Portraits. 

1886. 

Feuillet's 'La Morte.' Written in 18S6. Published in 1890 
in second edition of Appreciations. 

Sir Thomas Browne. Written in 1886. Published in 1889 
in Appreciations. 

Sebastian van Storck. Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine 
in March, 1886. Reprinted in 1887 in Imaginary Por- 
traits. 

Denys l'Auxerrois. Appeared in Macmillan^s Magazine 
in October, 1886. Reprinted in 1887 in Imaginary Por- 
traits. 

1887. 

Duke Carl of Rosenmold. Appeared in Macmillan's Maga- 
zine in May, 1887. Reprinted in the same year in 
Imaginary Portraits. 
Imaginary Portraits, Published 1887 by Messrs. Macmillan. 
Contained : — 

A Prince of Court Painters. See 1S85. 
Denys VAuxerrois. See 1886. 
Sebastian van Storck. See 1886. 
Duke Carl of Rosenmold. See above. 



PREFACE 



1888. 



Gaston de Latour. Appeared in MacmillarHs Magazine as 
under: viz. 

Chapter I. in June. 
II. in July, 

III. in August. 

IV. in September. 
V. in October. 

Style. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in December, 1888. 

Reprinted in 1889 in Appreciations. 
The Renaissance. Third edition. Messrs. Macmillan. Con- 
tained : — 

Two Early French Stories. 

Pico della Miranda la. 

Sandra Botticelli. 

Luca della Robbia. 

The Poetry af Michelangelo. 

Leonardo da Vinci. 

The School of Giargione. See 1877. 

Joachini du Bellay. 

Winckehjiann. 

Conclusion. 

i88g. 

HiPPOLYTUS Veiled. Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in 

August, 1889. Reprinted in 1895 in Greek Studies. 
Giordano Bruno. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in August, 

1889. 
Appreciations, with an Essay on Style. Published 1889 
by Messrs. Macmillan. Contained : — 
Style. See 1SS8. 
Wordsworth. See 1874. 
Coleridge. See 1866. 
Charles Lamb. See 1878. 
Sir Thomas Browne. See 1886. 



PREFACE xi 

Love's Labour'' s Lost. See 1878. 
Measure for Measure. See 1874. 
Shakspere's English Kings. 
Esthetic Poetry. See 1868. 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti. See 1 883. 
Postscript. See under ' Romanticism,' 1876. 

1890. 

Art Notes in North Italy. Appeared in New Review 
in November, 1890 Reprinted in 1895 ^^ ^^^ present 
volume. 

Prosper M^rim^e. Delivered as a lecture at Oxford in 
November, 1890. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in 
December, 1890. Reprinted in 1895 i" ^^ present 
volume. 

Appreciations. Second edition. Messrs. Macmillan. Con- 
tained as in first edition 1889, but omitting Esthetic Poetry 
and including a paper on Feuillefs "La Morte " (see 1886). 

1892. 

The Genius of Plato. Appeared in Cotitemporary Review 
in February, 1892. Reprinted 1893 as Chapter VI of 
Plato and Platonism. 

A Chapter on Plato. Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine 
in May, 1892. Reprinted 1893 ^^ Chapter I of Plato and 
Platonism. 

LACED^MON. Appeared in Contemporary Review in June, 
1892. Reprinted 1893 ^s Chapter VIII of Plato and 
Platonism. 

Emerald Uthwart. Appeared in New Review in June and 
July, 1892. Reprinted in 1895 i" ^^^ present volume. 

Raphael. Delivered as a lecture at Oxford in August, 1892. 
Appeared in Fortnightly Review in October, 1892. Re- 
printed in 1895 i^ ^^^ present volume. 



xii PREFACE 

1893. 

Apollo in Picardy. Appeared in Harper^s Magazine in 

November, 1893. Reprinted in 1895 i" ^^ present 

volume. 
Plato and Platonism. Published 1893 by Messrs. Mactnillan. 

Included, as Chapters I, VI, and VIII, papers which had 

already appeared in Magazines in 1892. 

1894. 

The Age of Athletic Prizemen. Appeared in Contempo- 
rary Revietv in February, 1894. Reprinted in 1895 in 
Greek Studies. 

Some Great Churches in France — (i) Notre-Dame 
d' Amiens; (2) Vezelay. Appeared in Nineteenth Cent- 
ury in March and June, 1894. Reprinted in 1895 ^'^ ^^ 
present volume. 

Pascal. Written for delivery as a lecture at Oxford in July, 
1894. Appeared in Contemporary Review in December, 
1894. Reprinted in 1895 ^^ "^^ present volume, 

1895. 

Greek Studies. Published 1895 by Messrs. Macmillan. Con- 
tained : — 

A Study of Dionysus. See 1876. 
The Bacchanals of Euripides. See 1878. 
The Myth of De77ieter and Persephone. See 1875. 
Hippolylus Veiled. See 1889. 
The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture — See 1880 — 
1. The Heroic Age of Greek Art. 
II. The Age of Graven Images. 
The Marbles of ^gina. See 1880. 
The Age of Athletic Prizemen. See 1894. 

C. L. S. 

August, 1895. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Prosper MfeRiMfeE i 

Raphael .26 

Pascal 48 

Art Notes in North Italy . . . , , 74 
Notre-Dame d'Amiens 91 

V^ZELAY 106 

Apollo in Picardy 121 

The Child in the House ...,.„ 147 
Emerald Uthwart . . . , . . ,170 
Diaphaneite 215 

xiii 



PROSPER MERIMEE.i 

For one born in eighteen hundred and three much 
was recently become incredible that had at least 
warmed the imagination even of the sceptical eigh- 
teenth century. Napoleon, sealing the tomb of the 
Revolution, had foreclosed many a problem, extin- 
guished many a hope, in the sphere of practice. And 
the mental parallel was drawn by Heine. In the men- 
tal world too a great outlook had lately been cut off. 
After Kant's criticism of the mind, its pretensions to 
pass beyond the limits of individual experience seemed 
as dead as those of old French royalty. And Kant 
did but furnish its innermost theoretic force to a 
more general criticism, which had withdrawn from 
every department of action, underlying principles once 
thought eternal. A time of disillusion followed. The 
typical personality of the day was Obermann, the very 
genius of ennui, a Frenchman disabused even of pa- 
triotism, who has hardly strength enough to die. More 
energetic souls, however, would recover themselves, 
and find some way of making the best of a changed 

lA lecture delivered at the Taylor Institution, Oxford, and at 
the London Institution. Published in the Fortnightly Review, Dec. 
1890, and now reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors. 
B I 



2 PROSPER MERIMEE 

world. Art : the passions, above all, the ecstasy and 
sorrow of love : a purely empirical knowledge of nature 
and man : these still remained, at least for pastime, 
in a world of which it was no longer proposed to cal- 
culate the remoter issues : — art, passion, science, 
however, in a somewhat novel attitude towards the 
practical interests of Hfe. The desillusionne, who had 
found in Kant's negations the last word concerning 
an unseen world, and is living, on the morrow of the 
Revolution, under a monarchy made out of hand, 
might seem cut off from certain ancient natural hopes, 
and will demand, from what is to interest him at all, 
something in the way of artificial stimulus. He has 
lost that sense of large proportion in things, that all- 
embracing prospect of life as a whole (from end to 
end of time and space, it had seemed), the utmost 
expanse of which was afforded from a cathedral tower 
of the Middle Age : by the church of the thirteenth 
century, that is to say, with its consequent aptitude 
for the co-ordination of human effort. Deprived of 
that exhilarating yet pacific outlook, imprisoned now 
in the narrow cell of its own subjective experience, 
the action of a powerful nature will be intense, but 
exclusive and peculiar. It will come to art, or science, 
to the experience of life itself, not as to portions of 
human nature's daily food, but as to something that 
must be, by the circumstances of the case, excep- 
tional ; almost as men turn in despair to gambling 
or narcotics, and in a little while the narcotic, the 
game of chance or skill, is valued for its own sake. 
The vocation of the artist; of the student of life or 



PROSPER MERIMEE 3 

books, will be realised with something — say ! of fanat- 
icism, as an end in itself, unrelated, unassociated. 
The science he turns to will be a science of crudest 
fact; the passion extravagant, a passionate love of 
passion, varied through all the exotic phases of French 
fiction as inaugurated by Balzac ; the art exaggerated, 
in matter or form, or both, as in Hugo or Baudelaire. 
The development of these conditions is the mental 
story of the nineteenth century, especially as exempli- 
fied in France. 

In no century would Prosper M^rim^e have been 
a theologian or metaphysician. But that sense of 
negation, of theoretic insecurity, was in the air, and 
conspiring with what was of like tendency in himself 
made of him a central type of disillusion. In him the 
passive ennui of Obermann became a satiric, aggres- 
sive, almost angry conviction of the littleness of the 
world around ; it was as if man's fatal limitations con- 
stituted a kind of stupidity in him, what the French 
call betise. Gossiping friends, indeed, linked what was 
constitutional in him and in the age with an incident 
of his earliest years. Corrected for some childish 
fault, in passionate distress, he overhears a half-pitying 
laugh at his expense, and has determined, in a moment, 
never again to give credit — to be for ever on his 
guard, especially against his own instinctive move- 
ments. Quite unreserved, certainly, he never was 
again. Almost everywhere he could detect the hollow 
ring of fundamental nothingness under the apparent 
surface of things. Irony surely, habitual irony, would 
be the proper complement thereto, on his part. la 



4 PROSPER MERIMEE 

his infallible self-possession, you might even fancy him 
a mere man of the world, with a special aptitude for 
matters of fact. Though indifferent in politics, he 
rises to social, to political eminence ; but all the while 
he is feeding all his scholarly curiosity, his imagina- 
tion, the very eye, with the, to him ever delightful, re- 
lieving, reassuring spectacle, of those straightforward 
forces in human nature, which are also matters of 
fact. There is the formula of Merimee ! the enthusi- 
astic amateur of rude, crude, naked force in men and 
women wherever it could be found ; himself carrying 
ever, as a mask, the conventional attire of the modern 
world — carrying it with an infinite, contemptuous 
grace, as if that, too, were an all- sufficient end in itself. 
With a natural gift for words, for expression, it will be 
his literary function to draw back the veil of time from 
the true greatness of old Roman character ; the veil of 
modern habit from the primitive energy of the creatures 
of his fancy, as the Letti-es a tine Inconntie discovered 
to general gaze, after his death, a certain depth of 
passionate force which had surprised him in himself. 
And how forcible will be their outlines in an other- 
wise insignificant world ! Fundamental belief gone, 
in almost all of us, at least some reUcs of it remain — 
queries, echoes, reactions, after-thoughts ; and they 
help to make an atmosphere, a mental atmosphere, 
hazy perhaps, yet with many secrets of soothing light 
and shade, associating more definite objects to each 
other by a perspective pleasant to the inward eye 
against a hopefully receding background of remoter 
and ever remoter possibilities. Not so with M^rim^e ! 



PROSPER MERIMEE 5 

For him the fundamental criticism has nothing more 
than it can do ; and there are no half-lights. The last 
traces of hypothesis, of supposition, are evaporated. 
Sylla, the false Demetrius, Carmen, Colomba, that 
impassioned self within himself, have no atmosphere. 
Painfully distinct in outline, inevitable to sight, unre- 
lieved, there they stand, like solitary mountain forms 
on some hard, perfectly transparent day. What 
M^rim^e gets around his singularly sculpturesque 
creations is neither more nor less than empty space. 
So disparate are his writings that at first sight you 
might fancy them only the random efforts of a man 
of pleasure or affairs, who, turning to this or that for 
the relief of a vacant hour, discovers to his surprise 
a workable literary gift, of whose scope, however, he 
is not precisely aware. His sixteen volumes never- 
theless range themselves in three compact groups. 
There are his letters — those Lettres a une Inconnue, 
and his letters to the librarian Panizzi, revealing him 
in somewhat close contact with political intrigue. But 
in this age of novehsts, it is as a writer of novels, and 
of fiction in the form of highly descriptive drama, that 
he will count for most : — Colomba, for instance, by its 
intellectual depth of motive, its firmly conceived struc- 
ture, by the faultlessness of its execution, vindicating 
the function of the novel as no tawdry light liteirature, 
but in very deed a fine art. The Chroniqiic du Regne 
de Charles IX, an unusually successful specimen of 
historical romance, links his imaginative work to the 
third group of M^rim^e's writings, his historical 
essays. One resource of the disabused soul of our 



6 PROSPER MERIMEE 

century, as we saw, would be the empirical study of 
facts, the empirical science of nature and man, sur- 
viving all dead metaphysical philosophies. Merimee, 
perhaps, may have had in him the making of a master 
of such science, disinterested, patient, exact : scalpel 
in hand, we may fancy, he would have penetrated far. 
But quite certainly he had something of genius for the 
exact study of history, for the pursuit of exact truth, 
with a keenness of scent as if that alone existed, in 
some special area of historic fact, to be determined by 
his own pecuHar mental preferences. Power here too 
again, — the crude power of men and women which 
mocks, while it makes its use of, average human 
nature : it was the magic function of history to put 
one in living contact with that. To weigh the purely 
physiognomic import of the memoir, of the pamphlet 
saved by chance, the letter, the anecdote, the very 
gossip by which one came face to face with energetic 
personalities : there lay the true business of the his- 
toric student, not in that pretended theoretic inter- 
pretation of events by their mechanic causes, with 
which he dupes others if not invariably himself. In 
the great hero of the Social War, in Sylla, studied, 
indeed, through his environment, but only so far as 
that was in dynamic contact with himself, you saw, 
without any manner of doubt, on one side, the solitary 
height of human genius ; on the other, though on the 
seemingly so heroic stage of antique Roman story, 
the wholly inexpressive level of the humanity of every 
day, the spectacle of man's eternal betise. Fascinated, 
like a veritable son of the old pagan Renaissance, 



PROSPER MERIMEE 7 

by the grandeur, the concentration, the satiric hard- 
ness of ancient Roman character, it is to Russia never- 
theless that he most readily turns — youthful Russia, 
whose native force, still unbelittled by our western 
civilisation, seemed to have in it the promise of 
a more dignified civilisation to come. It was as if 
old Rome itself were here again ; as, occasionally, 
a new quarry is laid open of what was thought long 
since exhausted, ancient marble, cipollino or verde 
antique. Merim^e, indeed, was not the first to dis- 
cern the fitness for imaginative service of the career 
of " the false Demetrius," pretended son of Ivan the 
Terrible ; but he alone seeks its utmost force in 
a calm, matter-of-fact carefully ascertained present- 
ment of the naked events. Yes ! In the last years 
of the Valois, when its fierce passions seemed to be 
bursting France to pieces, you might have seen, far 
away beyond the rude Polish dominion of which one 
of those Valois princes had become king, a display 
more effective still of exceptional courage and cun- 
ning, of horror in circumstance, of betise, of course, of 
betise and a slavish capacity of being duped, in average 
mankind : all that under a mask of solemn Muscovite 
court-ceremonial. And M^rimde's style, simple and 
unconcerned, but with the eye ever on its object, 
lends itself perfectly to such purpose — to an almost 
phlegmatic discovery of the facts, in all their crude 
natural colouring, as if he but held up to view, as 
a piece of evidence, some harshly dyed oriental carpet 
from the sumptuous floor of the Kremlin, on which 
blood had fallen. 



8 PROSPER MERIMEE 

A lover of ancient Rome, its great character and 
incident, M^rim^e valued, as if it had been personal 
property of his, every extant relic of it in the art that 
had been most expressive of its genius — architecture. 
In that grandiose art of building, the most national, 
the most tenaciously rooted of all the arts in the 
stable conditions of life, there were historic docu- 
ments hardly less clearly legible than the manuscript 
chronicle. By the mouth of those stately Roman- 
esque churches, scattered in so many strongly charac- 
terised varieties over the soil of France, above all in 
the hot, half-pagan south, the people of empire still 
protested, as he understood, against what must seem 
a smaller race. The Gothic enthusiasm indeed was 
already born, and he shared it — felt intelligently the 
fascination of the Pointed Style, but only as a further 
transformation of old Roman structure ; the round 
arch is for him still the great architectural form, la 
forme noble, because it was to be seen in the monu- 
ments of antiquity. Romanesque, Gothic, the manner 
of the Renaissance, of Lewis the Fourteenth : — they 
wfere all, as in a written record, in the old abbey 
church of Saint-Savin, of which Merimee was in- 
structed to draw up a report. Again, it was as if to 
his concentrated attention through many months that 
deserted sanctuary of Benedict were the only thing on 
earth. Its beauties, its peculiarities, its odd military 
features, its faded mural paintings, are no merely 
picturesque matter for the pencil he could use so well, 
but the lively record of a human society. With what 
appetite ! with all the animation of George Sand's 



PROSPER MERIMEE 9 

Mauprai, he tells the story of romantic violence 
having its way there, defiant of law, so late as the 
year 1611; of the family of robber nobles perched, 
as abbots in cotnfnefidatn, in those sacred places. 
That grey, pensive old church in the little valley of 
Poitou, was for a time Hke Santa Maria del Fiore 
to Michelangelo, the mistress of his affections — of 
a practical affection ; for the result of his elaborate 
report was the Government grant which saved the 
place from ruin. In architecture, certainly, he had 
what for that day was nothing less than intuition 
— an intuitive sense, above all, of its logic, of the 
necessity which draws into one all minor changes, as 
elements in a reasonable development. And his 
care for it, his curiosity about it, were symptomatic 
of his own genius. Structure, proportion, design, 
a sort of architectural coherency : that was the 
aim of his method in the art of literature, in that 
form of it, especially, which he will live by, in 
fiction. 

As historian and archaeologist, as a man of erudition 
turned artist, he is well seen in the Chronique du 
Regne de Charles IX, by which we pass naturally 
from M^rimee's critical or scientific work to the prod- 
ucts of his imagination. What economy in the use 
of a large antiquarian knowledge ! what an instinct 
I amid a hundred details, for the detail that carries 
I physiognomy in it, that really tells ! And again what 
' 6utline,~what absolute clarity of outline ! For the 
historian of that puzzling age which centres in the 
"Eve of Saint Bartholomew," outward events them- 



10 PROSPER MERIMEE 

selves seem obscured by the vagueness of motive of 
the actors in them. But Merimee, disposing of them 
as an artist, not in love with half-lights, compels 
events and actors alike to the clearness he desired; 
takes his side without hesitation ; and makes his hero 
a Huguenot of pure blood, allowing its charm, in that 
charming youth, even to Huguenot piety. And as 
for the incidents — however freely it may be under- 
mined by historic doubt, all reaches a perfectly firm 
surface, at least for the eye of the reader. The 
Chronicle of Charles the Ninth is like a series of 
masterly drawings in illustration of a period — the 
period in which two other masters of French fiction 
have found their opportunity, mainly by the develop- 
ment of its actual historic characters. Those charac- 
ters — Catherine de Medicis and the rest — M^rim^e, 
with significant irony and self-assertion, sets aside, 
preferring to think of them as essentially common- 
place. For him the interest lies in the creatures of 
his own will, who carry in them, however, so lightly ! 
a learning equal to Balzac's, greater than that of 
Dumas. He knows with like completeness the mere 
fashions of the time — how courtier and soldier dressed 
themselves, and the large movements of the desperate 
game which fate or chance was playing with those 
pretty pieces. Comparing that favourite century of 
the French Renaissance with our own, he notes a 
decadence of the more energetic passions in the 
interest of general tranquillity, and perhaps (only 
perhaps !) of general happiness. " Assassination " he 
observes, as if with regret, " is no longer a part of our 



PROSPER MERIMEE 11 

manners." In fact, the duel, and the whole morality 
~^f"the duel, which does but enforce a certain regu- 
larity on assassination, what has been well called le 
sentiment du fer, the sentiment of deadly steel, had 
then the disposition of refined existence. It was, 
indeed, very different, and is, in Merimee's romance. 
In his gallant hero, Bernard de Mergy, all the prompt- 
ings of the lad's virile goodness are in natural collusion 
with that sentiment dufer. Amid his ingenuous blushes, 
his prayers, and plentiful tears between-while, it is a 
part of his very sex. With his delightful, fresh-blown 
•air, he is for ever tossing the sheath from the sword, but 
always as if into bright natural sunshine. A winsome, 
yet withal serious and even piteous figure, he conveys 
his pleasantness, in spite of its gloomy theme, into 
Merimee's one quite cheerful book. 

Cheerful, because, after all, the gloomy passions it 
presents are but the accidents of a particular age, and 
not Uke the mental conditions in which M^rim^e was 
most apt to look for the spectacle of human power, 
allied to madness or disease in the individual. For 
him, at least, it was the office of fiction to carry one 
into a different if not a better world than that actually 
around us ; and if the Chronicle of Charles the Ninth 
provided an escape from the tame circumstances of 
contemporary hfe into an impassioned past, Colomba 
is a measure of the resources for mental alteration 
which may be found even in the modern age. There 
was a corner of the French Empire, in the manners of 
which assassination still had a large part. 

** The beauty of Corsica," says M^rim^e, " is grave 



12 PROSPER MERIMEE 

and sad. The aspect of the capital does but augment 
the impression caused by the soUtude that surrounds 
it. There is no movement in the streets. You hear 
there none of the laughter, the singing, the loud 
talking, common in the towns of Italy. Sometimes, 
under the shadow of a tree on the promenade, a dozen 
armed peasants will be playing cards, or looking on 
at the game. The Corsican is naturally silent. Those 
who walk the pavement are all strangers : the islanders 
stand at their doors : every one seems to be on the 
watch, like a falcon on its nest. All around the gulf 
there is but an expanse of tanglework; beyond it, 
bleached mountains. Not a habitation ! Only, here 
and there, on the heights about the town, certain 
white constructions detach themselves from the back- 
ground of green. They are funeral chapels or family 
tombs." 

Crude in colour, sombre, taciturn, Corsica, as 
M^rimee here describes it, is like the national passion 
of the Corsican — that morbid personal pride, usurping 
the place even of grief for the dead, which centuries 
of traditional violence had concentrated into an all- 
absorbing passion for bloodshed, for bloody revenges, 
in collusion with the natural wildness, and the wild 
social condition of the island still unaffected even by 
the finer ethics of the duel. The supremacy of that 
passion is well indicated by the cry, put into the 
mouth of a young man in the presence of the corpse 
of his father deceased in the course of nature — a young 
man meant to be common-place. " Ah ! Would thou 
hadst died malamorte — by violence ! We might have 



PROSPER MERIMEE 13 

avenged thee ! " In Colomba, M^rim^e's best known 
creation, it is united to a singularly wholesome type 
of personal beauty, a natural grace of manner which 
is irresistible, a cunning intellect patiently diverting 
every circumstance to its design ; and presents itself 
as a kind of genius, allied to fatal disease of mind. 
The interest of M^rim^e's book is that it allows us to 
watch the action of this malignant power on Colomba's 
brother, Orso della Rebbia, as it discovers, rouses, 
concentrates to the leaping-point, in the somewhat 
weakly diffused nature of the youth, the dormant 
elements of a dark humour akin to her own. Two 
years after his father's murder, presumably at the 
instigation of his ancestral enemies, the young lieu- 
tenant is returning home in the company of two 
humorously conventional English people, himself now 
half Parisianised, with an immense natural cheerful- 
ness, and wilHng to believe an account of the crime 
which relieves those hated Barricini of all complicity 
in its guilt. But from the first, Colomba, with " voice 
soft and musical," is at his side, gathering every 
accident and echo and circumstance, the very lightest 
circumstance, into the chain of 'necessity which draws 
him to the action every one at home expects of him 
as the head of his race. He is not unaware. Her 
very silence on the matter speaks so plainly. " You 
are forming me ! " he admits. " Well ! ' Hot shot, or 
cold steel ! ' — you see I have not forgotten my Corsi- 
can." More and more, as he goes on his way with 
her, he finds himself accessible to the damning 
thoughts he has so long combated. In horror, he 



14 PROSPER MERIMEE 

tries to disperse them by the memory of his com- 
rades in the regiment, the drawing-rooms of Paris, 
the EngHsh lady who has promised to be his bride, 
and will shortly visit him in the humble manoir of his 
ancestors. From his first step among them the 
villagers of Pietranera, divided already into two rival 
camps, are watching him in suspense — Pietranera, 
perched among those deep forests where the stifled 
sense of violent death is everywhere. Colomba places 
in his hands the little chest which contains the father's 
shirt covered with great spots of blood. *' Behold 
the lead that struck him ! " and she laid on the shirt 
two rusted bullets. " Orso ! you will avenge him ! " 
She embraces him with a kind of madness, kisses 
wildly the bullets and the shirt, leaves him with the 
terrible rehcs already exerting their mystic power 
upon him. It is as if in the nineteenth century a girl, 
amid Christian habits, had gone back to that primitive 
old pagan version of the story of the Grail, which 
identifies it not with the Most Precious Blood, but 
only with the blood of a murdered relation crying for 
vengeance. Awake at last in his old chamber at 
Pietranera, the house of the Barricini at the other end 
of the square, with its rival tower and rudely carved 
escutcheons, stares him in the face. His ancestral 
enemy is there, an aged man now, but with two well- 
grown sons, like two stupid dumb animals, whose 
innocent blood will soon be on his so oddly lighted 
conscience. At times, his better hope seemed to lie in 
picking a quarrel and killing at least in fair fight, one 
of these two stupid dumb animals ; with rude ill-sup- 



PROSPER MERIMEE IS 

pressed laughter one day, as they overhear Colomba's 
violent utterances at a funeral feast, for she is a re- 
nowned improvisatrice. " Your father is an old man," 
he finds himself saying, " I could crush with my hands. 
'Tis for you I am destined, for you and your brother ! " 
And if it is by course of nature that the old man dies 
not long after the murder of these sons (self-pro- 
voked after all), dies a fugitive at Pisa, as it happens, 
by an odd accident, in the presence of Colomba, no 
violent death by Orso's own hand could have been 
more to her mind. In that last hard page of M^rimee's 
story, mere dramatic propriety itself for a moment 
seems to plead for the forgiveness, which from Joseph 
and his brethren to the present day, as we know, has 
been as winning in story as in actual life. Such 
dramatic propriety, however, was by no means in 
M^rim^e's way. "What I must have is the hand 
that fired the shot," she had sung, " the eye that 
guided it ; aye ! and the mind moreover — the mind, 
which had conceived the deed ! " And now, it is in 
idiotic terror, a fugitive from Orso's vengeance, that 
the last of the Barricini is dying. 

Exaggerated art ! you think. But it was precisely 
such exaggerated art, intense, unrelieved, an art of 
fierce colours, that is needed by those who are seek- 
ing in art, as I said of Merim^e, a kind of artificial 
stimulus. And if his style is still impeccably correct, 
cold-blooded, impersonal, as impersonal as that of 
Scott himself, it does but conduce the better to his 
one exclusive aim. It is like the polish of the stiletto 
Colomba carried always under her mantle, or the 



16 PROSPER MERIMEE 

beauty of the fire-arms, that beauty coming of nice 
adaptation to purpose, which she understood so well — 
a task characteristic also of M^rimee himself, a sort of 
fanatic joy in the perfect pistol-shot, at its height in 
the singular story he has translated from the Rus- 
sian of Pouchkuie. Those raw colours he preferred ; 
Spanish, Oriental, African, perhaps, irritant certainly 
to cisalpine eyes, he undoubtedly attained the colour- 
ing you associate with sun-stroke, only possible under 
a sun in which dead things rot quickly. 

Pity and terror, we know, go to the making of the 
essential tragic sense. In M^rimee, certainly, we have 
all its terror, but without the pity. Saint-Clair, the 
consent of his mistress barely attained at last, rushes 
madly on self-destruction, that he may die with the 
taste of his great love fresh on his lips. All the gro- 
tesque accidents of violent death he records with 
visual exactness, and no pains to relieve them ; the 
ironic indifference, for instance, with which, on the 
scaffold or the battle-field, a man will seem to grin 
foolishly at the ugly rents through which his life has 
passed. Seldom or never has the mere pen of a 
writer taken us so close to the cannon's mouth as in 
the Taking of the Redoubt, while Matteo Falcone — 
twenty- five short pages — is perhaps the cruellest story 
in the world. 

Colomba, that strange, fanatic being, who has a code 
of action, of self-respect, a conscience, all to herself, 
who with all her virginal charm only does not make 
you hate her, is, in truth, the type of a sort of human- 
ity M^rimee found it pleasant to dream of — a human- 



PROSPER MERIMEE 17 

ity as alien as the animals, with whose moral affinities 
to man his imaginative work is often directly concerned. 
Were they so alien, after all? Were there not sur- 
vivals of the old wild creatures in the gentlest, the 
politest of us? Stories that told of sudden freaks of 
gentle, polite natures, straight back, not into Paradise, 
were always welcome to men's fancies ; and that could 
only be because they found a psychologic truth in 
them. With much success, with a credibility insured 
by his literary tact, M^rim^e tried his own hand at 
such stories : unfrocked the bear in the amorous young 
Lithuanian noble, the wolf in the revolting peasant 
of the Middle Age. There were survivals surely in 
himself, in that stealthy presentment of his favourite 
themes, in his own art. You seem to find your hand 
on a serpent, in reading him. 

In such survivals, indeed, you see the operation of 
his favourite motive, the sense of wild power, under 
a sort of mask, or assumed habit, realised as the very 
genius of nature itself; and that interest, with some 
superstitions closely allied to it, the belief in the vam- 
pire, for instance, is evidenced especially in certain 
pretended lUyrian compositions — prose translations, 
the reader was to understand, of more or less ancient 
popular ballads ; La Guzla, he called the volume. The 
Lyre, as we might say; only that the instrument of 
the Illyrian minstrel had but one string. Artistic de- 
ception, a trick of which there is something in the 
historic romance as such, in a book like his own 
Chronicle of Charles the Ninth, was always welcome 
to M^rim^e ; it was part of the machinery of his rooted 



18 PROSPER MERIMEE 

habit of intellectual reserve. A master of irony also, 
in Madame Lucrezia he seems to wish to expose his 
own method cynically; to explain his art — how he 
takes you in — as a clever, confident conjuror might do. 
So properly were the readers of La Guzla taken in 
that he followed up his success in that line by the 
Theatre of Clara Gazul, purporting to be from a rare 
Spanish original, the work of a nun, who, under tame, 
conventual reading, had felt the touch of mundane, of 
physical passions ; had become a dramatic poet, and 
herself a powerful actress. It may dawn on you in 
reading her that M^rim^e was a kind of Webster, but 
with the superficial mildness of our nineteenth century. 
At the bottom of the true drama there is ever, logi- 
cally at least, the ballad : the ballad dealing in a kind 
of short-hand (or, say ! in grand, simple, universal 
outlines) with those passions, crimes, mistakes, which 
have a kind of fatality in them, a kind of necessity to 
come to the surface of the human mind, if not to the 
surface of our experience, as in the case of some frankly 
supernatural incidents which M^rim^e re-handled. 
Whether human love or hatred has had most to do in 
shaping the universal fancy that the dead come back, 
I cannot say. Certainly that old ballad literature has 
instances in plenty, in which the voice, the hand, the 
brief visit from the grave, is a natural response to the 
cry of the human creature. That ghosts should return, 
as they do so often in Merim^e's fiction, is but a sort 
of natural justice. Only, in M^rim^e's prose ballads, 
in those admirable, short, ballad-like stories, where 
every word tells, of which he was a master, almost 



PROSPER MERIMEE 19 

the inventor, they are a kind of half-material ghosts — 
a vampire tribe — and never come to do people good ; 
congruously with the mental constitution of the writer, 
which, alike in fact and fiction, could hardly have 
horror enough — theme after theme. M^rimee him- 
self emphasises this almost constant motive of his fic- 
tion when he adds to one of his volumes of short stories 
some letters on a matter of fact — a Spanish bull-fight, 
in which those old Romans, he regretted, might seem, 
decadently, to have survived. It is as if you saw it. 
In truth, M^rim^e was the unconscious parent of much 
we may think of dubious significance in later French 
literature. It is as if there were nothing to tell of in 
this world but various forms of hatred, and a love that 
is like lunacy; and the only other world, a world of 
maliciously active, hideous, dead bodies. 

M^rim^e, a literary artist, was not a man who used 
two words Avhere one would do better, and he shines 
especially in those brief compositions which, like 
a minute intaglio, reveal at a glance his wonderful 
faculty of design and proportion in the treatment 
of his work, in which there is not a touch but counts. 
That is an art of which there are few examples in 
English ; our somewhat diffuse, or slipshod, literary 
language hardly lending itself to the concentration 
of thought and expression, which are of the essence 
of such writing. It is otherwise in French, and if you 
wish to know what art of that kind can come to, read 
M^rimee's little romances ; best of all, perhaps, La 
Venus (Pllle and Arsene Guillot. The former is 
a modern version of the beautiful old story of the 



20 PROSPER MERIMEE 

Ring given to Venus, given to her, in this case, by 
a somewhat sordid creature of the nineteenth century, 
whom she looks on with more than disdain. The 
strange outline of the Canigou, one of the most 
imposing outlying heights of the Pyrenees, down the 
mysterious slopes of which the traveller has made his 
way towards nightfall into the great plain of Toulouse, 
forms an impressive background, congruous with the 
many relics of irrepressible old paganism there, but 
in entire contrast to the bourgeois comfort of the 
place where his journey is to end, the abode of an 
aged antiquary, loud and bright just now with the 
celebration of a vulgar worldly marriage. In the 
midst of this well-being, prosaic in spite of the neigh- 
bourhood, in spite of the pretty old wedding customs, 
morsels of that local colour in which M^rim^e de- 
lights, the old pagan powers are supposed to reveal 
themselves once more (malignantly, of course), in 
the person of a magnificent bronze statue of Venus 
recently unearthed in the antiquary's garden. On 
her finger, by ill-luck, the coarse young bridegroom 
on the morning of his marriage places for a moment 
the bridal ring only too effectually (the bronze hand 
closes, like a wilful living one, upon it), and dies, you 
are to understand, in her angry metallic embraces on 
his marriage night. From the first, indeed, she had 
seemed bent on crushing out men's degenerate bodies 
and souls, though the supernatural horror of the tale 
is adroitly made credible by a certain vagueness in 
the events, which covers a quite natural account of 
the bridegroom's mysterious death. 



PROSPER MERIMEE 21 

The intellectual charm of literary work so thoroughly- 
designed as M^rimee's depends in part on the sense 
as you read, hastily perhaps, perhaps in need of 
patience, that you are dealing with a composition, the 
full secret of which is only to be attained in the last 
paragraph, that with the last word in mind you will 
retrace your steps, more than once (it may be) noting 
then the minuter structure, also the natural or wrought 
flowers by the way. Nowhere is such method better 
illustrated than by another of M^rim^e's quintessen- 
tial pieces, Arsene Guillot, and here for once with a 
conclusion ethically acceptable also. Merim^e loved 
surprises in human nature, but it is not often that he 
surprises us by tenderness or generosity of charac- 
ter, as another master of French fiction, M. Octave 
Feuillet, is apt to do ; and the simple pathos of Arsene 
Guillot gives it a unique place in Merim^e's writings. 
It may be said, indeed, that only an essentially pitiful 
nature could have told the exquisitely cruel story of 
Matteo Falcone precisely as M^rimee has told it ; 
and those who knew him testify abundantly to his 
own capacity for generous friendship. He was no 
more wanting than others in those natural sympathies 
(sending tears to the eyes at the sight of suffering age 
or childhood) which happily are no extraordinary 
component in men's natures. It was, perhaps, no 
fitting return for a friendship of over thirty years to 
pubhsh posthumously those Lettres a une Inconnue, 
which reveal that reserved, sensitive, self-centred 
nature, a little pusillanimously in the power, at the 
disposition of another. For just there lies the interest, 



22 PROSPER MERIMEE 

the psychological interest, of those letters. An 
amateur of power, of the spectacle of power and 
force, followed minutely but without sensibility on 
his part, with a kind of cynic pride rather for the 
mainspring of his method, both of thought and ex- 
pression, you find him here taken by surprise at last, 
and somewhat humbled, by an unsuspected force of 
affection in himself. His correspondent, unknown 
but for these letters except just by name, figures in 
them as, in truth, a being only too much Uke himself, 
seen from one side ; reflects his taciturnity, his touchi- 
ness, his increduHty except for self-torment. Agitated, 
dissatisfied, he is wresthng in her with himself, his 
own difficult quaUties. He demands from her a free- 
dom, a frankness, he would have been the last to 
grant. It is by first thoughts, of course, that what is 
forcible and effective in human nature, the force, there- 
fore, of carnal love, discovers itself j and for her first 
thoughts Merimee is always pleading, but always 
complaining that he gets only her second thoughts ; 
the thoughts, that is, of a reserved, self-limiting 
nature, well under the yoke of convention, like his 
own. Strange conjunction ! At the beginning of the 
correspondence he seems to have been seeking only 
a fine intellectual companionship ; the lady, perhaps, 
I looking for something warmer. Towards such com- 
1 panionship that likeness to himself in her might have 
been helpful, but was not enough of a complement 
to his own nature to be anything but an obstruction 
in love ; and it is to that, little by little, that his 
humour turns. He — the Megalopsychus, as Aristotle 



PROSPER MERIMEE 23 

defines him — acquires all the lover's humble habits : 
himself displays all the tricks of love, its casuistries, its 
exigency, its superstitions, aye ! even its vulgarities ; 
involves with the significance of his own genius the 
mere hazards and inconsequence of a perhaps average 
nature ; but too late in the day — the years. After the 
attractions and repulsions of half a lifetime, they are 
but friends, and might forget to be that, but for his 
death, clearly presaged in his last weak, touching 
letter, just two hours before. There, too, had been 
the blind and naked force of nature and circumstance, 
surprising him in the uncontrollable movements of his 
own so carefully guarded heart. 

The intimacy, the effusion, the so freely exposed 
personality of those letters does but emphasise the 
fact that impersonality was, in literary art, Merimee's 
central aim. Personality versus impersonality in art : — 
how much or how little of one's self one may put into 
one's work : whether anything at all of it : whether 
one can put there anything else : — is clearly a far- 
reaching and complex question. Serviceable as the 
basis of a precautionary maxim towards the conduct 
of our work, self-effacement, or impersonality, in 
literary or artistic creation, is, perhaps, after all, as 
little possible as a strict realism. " It has always been 
my rule to put nothing of myself into my works," 
says another great master of French prose, Gustave 
Flaubert ; but, luckily as we may think, he often 
failed in thus effacing himself, as he too was aware. 
" It has always been my rule to put nothing of myself 
into my works " (to be disinterested in his literary 



24 PROSPER MERIMEE 

creations, so to speak), "yet I have put much of my- 
self into them " : and where he failed M^rim^e suc- 
ceeded. There they stand — Carmen, Colomba, the 
"False" Demetrius — as detached from him as from 
each other, with no more filial likeness to their maker 
than if they were the work of another person. And 
to his method of conception, M^rim^e's much-praised 
literary style, his method of expression, is strictly 
conformable — impersonal in its beauty, the perfection 
of nobody's style — thus vindicating anew by its very 
impersonality that much worn, but not untrue saying, 
that the style is the man : — a man, impassible, un- 
familiar, impeccable, veiling a deep sense of what is 
forcible, nay, terrible, in things, under the sort of 
personal pride that makes a man a nice observer 
of all that is most conventional. Essentially unlike 
other people, he is always fastidiously in the fashion — 
an expert in all the little, half-contemptuous elegances 
of which it is capable. M^rim^e's superb self-efface- 
ment, his impersonahty, is itself but an effective 
personal trait, and, transferred to art, becomes a 
markedly peculiar quahty of literary beauty. For, 
inv truth, this creature of disillusion who had no care 
for\ half-lights, and, like his creations, had no atmos- 
phere about him, gifted as he was with pure mind, 
witn the quality which secures flawless literary struc- 
ture, had, on the other hand, nothing of what we call 
soul in literature : — hence, also, that singular harshness 
in his ideal, as if, in theological language, he were 
incapable of grace. He has none of those subjec- 
tivities, colourings, pecuHarities of mental refraction, 



PROSPER MERIMEE 25 

which necessitate varieties of style — could we spare 
such ? — and render the perfections of it no merely 
negative qualities. There are masters of French 
prose whose art has begun where the art of M^rim^e 
leaves off. 



RAPHAEL.^ 

By his immense productiveness, by the even per- 
fection of what he produced, its fitness to its own day, 
its hold on posterity, in the suavity of his hfe, some 
would add in the "opportunity" of his early death, 
Raphael may seem a signal instance of the luckiness, 
of the good fortune, of genius. Yet, if we follow 
the actual growth of his powers, within their proper 
framework, the age of the Renaissance — an age of 
which we may say, summarily, that it enjoyed itself, 
and found perhaps its chief enjoyment in the attitude 
of the scholar, in the enthusiastic acquisition of knowl- 
edge for its own sake : — if we thus view Raphael and 
his works in their environment we shall find even his 
seemingly mechanical good fortune hardly distinguish- 
able from his own patient disposal of the means 
at hand. Facile master as he may seem, as indeed 
he is, he is also one of the world's typical scholars, 
with Plato, and Cicero, and Virgil, and Milton. The 
formula of his genius, if we must have one, is this: 
genius by accumulation ; the transformation of meek 
scholarship into genius — triumphant power of genius. 

lA lecture delivered to the University Extension Students, Oxford, 
2 August, 1892. Published in the Fortnightly Review, Oct. 1892, 
and now reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors. 
26 



RAPHAEL 27 

Urbino, where this prince of the Renaissance was 
born in 1483, year also of the birth of Luther, leader 
of the other great movement of that age, the Reforma- 
tion — Urbino, under its dukes of the house of Monte- 
feltro, had wherewithal just then to make a boy of 
native artistic faculty from the first a willing learner. 
The gloomy old fortress of the feudal masters of 
the town had been replaced, in those later years 
of the Quattro-cento, by a consummate monument of 
Quatiro- cento taste, a museum of ancient and modern 
art, the owners of which lived there, gallantly at 
home, amid the choicer flowers of living humanity. 
The ducal palace was, in fact, become nothing less 
than a school of ambitious youth in all the accom- 
plishments alike of war and peace. Raphael's con- 
nexion with it seems to have become intimate, and 
from the first its influence must have overflowed so 
small a place. In the case of the lucky Raphael, for 
once, the actual conditions of early life had been 
suitable, propitious, accordant to what one's imagina- 
tion would have required for the childhood of the 
man. He was born amid the art he was, not to trans- 
form, but to perfect, by a thousand reverential retouch- 
ings. In no palace, however, but in a modest abode, 
still shown, containing the workshop of his father, 
Giovanni Santi. But here, too, though in frugal 
form, art, the arts, were present. A store of artistic 
objects was, or had recently been, made there, and 
now especially, for fitting patrons, religious pictures 
in the old Umbrian manner. In quiet nooks of the 
Apennines Giovanni's works remain; and there is 



28 RAPHAEL 

one of them, worth study, in spite of what critics say 
of its crudity, in the National Gallery. Concede its 
immaturity, at least, though an immaturity visibly 
susceptible of a delicate grace, it wins you neverthe- 
less to return again and again, and ponder, by a sin- 
cere expression of sorrow, profound, yet resigned, be 
the cause what it may, among all the many causes of 
sorrow inherent in the ideal of maternity, human or 
divine. But if you keep in mind when looking at it 
the facts of Raphael's childhood, you will recognise in 
his father's picture, not the anticipated sorrow of the 
"Mater Dolorosa" over the dead son, but the grief 
of a simple household over the mother herself taken 
early from it. That may have been the first picture 
the eyes of the world's great painter of Madonnas 
rested on ; and if he stood diligently before it to copy, 
and so copying, quite unconsciously, and with no dis- 
loyalty to his original, refined, improved, substituted, 
— substituted himself, in fact, his finer self — he had 
already struck the persistent note of his career. As 
with his age, it is his vocation, ardent worker as he is, 
to enjoy himself — to enjoy himself amiably, and to 
find his chief enjoyment in the attitude of a scholar. 
And one by one, one after another, his masters, the 
very greatest of them, go to school to him. 

It was so especially with the artist of whom Raphael 
first became certainly a learner — Perugino. Giovanni 
Santi had died in Raphael's childhood, too early to 
have been in any direct sense his teacher. The lad, 
however, from one and another, had learned much, 
when, with his share of the patrimony in hand, enough 



RAPHAEL 29 

to keep him, but not to tempt him from scholarly 
ways, he came to Perugia, hoping still further to 
improve himself. He was in his eighteenth year, 
and how he looked just then you may see in a drawing 
of his own in the University Galleries, of somewhat 
stronger mould than less genuine likenesses may lead 
you to expect. There is something of a fighter in the 
way in which the nose springs from the brow between 
the wide-set, meditative eyes. A strenuous lad ! ca- 
pable of plodding, if you dare apply that word to 
labour so impassioned as his — to any labour whatever 
done at Perugia, centre of the dreamiest Apennine 
scenery. Its various elements (one hardly knows 
whether one is thinking of Italian nature or of 
Raphael's art in recounting them), the richly-planted 
lowlands, the sensitive mountain lines in flight one 
beyond the other into clear distance, the cool yet 
glowing atmosphere, the romantic morsels of archi- 
tecture, which lend to the entire scene I know not 
what expression of reposeful antiquity, arrange them- 
selves here as for set purpose of pictorial effect, 
and have gone with little change into his painted 
backgrounds. In the midst of it, on titanic old 
Roman and Etruscan foundations, the later Gothic 
town had piled itself along the lines of a gigantic 
land of rock, stretched out from the last slope of the 
Apennines into the plain. Between its fingers steep 
dark lanes wind down into the olive gardens; on the 
finger-tips military and monastic builders had perched 
their towns. A place as fantastic in its attractiveness 
as the human life which then surged up and down in 



30 RAPHAEL 

it in contrast to the peaceful scene around. The 
Baglioni who ruled there had brought certain tenden- 
cies of that age to a typical completeness of expression, 
veiling crime — crime, it might seem, for its own 
sake, a whole octave of fantastic crime — not merely 
under brilliant fashions and comely persons, but under 
fashions and persons, an outward presentment of life 
and of themselves, which had a kind of immaculate 
grace and discretion about them, as if Raphael him- 
self had already brought his unerring gift of selection 
to bear upon it all for motives of art. With life in 
those streets of Perugia, as with nature, with the work 
of his masters, with the mere exercises of his fellow- 
students, his hand rearranges, refines, renews, as if 
by simple contact; but it is met here half-way in its 
renewing office by some special aptitude for such grace 
in the subject itself. Seemingly innocent, full of 
natural gaiety, eternally youthful, those seven and more 
deadly sins, embodied and attired in just the jaunty 
dress then worn, enter now and afterwards as specta- 
tors, or assistants, into many a sacred foreground and 
background among the friends and kinsmen of the 
Holy Family, among the very angels, gazing, con- 
versing, standing firmly and unashamed. During his 
apprenticeship at Perugia Raphael visited and left 
his work in more modest places round about, along 
those seductive mountain or lowland roads, and copied 
for one of them Perugino's "Marriage of the Virgin " 
significantly, did it by many degrees better, with a 
very novel effect of motion everywhere, and with that 
grace which natural motion evokes, introducing for a 



RAPHAEL 31 

temple in the background a lovely bit of his friend 
Bramante's sort of architecture, the true Renaissance 
or perfected Qiiattro-cento architecture. He goes on 
building a whole lordly new city of the like as he 
paints to the end of his life. The subject, we may 
note, as we leave Perugia in Raphael's company, had 
been suggested by the famous mystic treasure of its 
cathedral church, the marriage ring of the Blessed 
Virgin herself. 

Raphael's copy had been made for the little old 
Apennine town of Citta di Castello; and another 
place he visits at this time is still more effective in 
the development of his genius. About his twentieth 
year he comes to Siena — that other rocky Titan's 
hand, just lifted out of the surface of the plain. It 
is the most grandiose place he has yet seen; it has 
not forgotten that it was once the rival of Florence ; 
and here the patient scholar passes under an influence 
of somewhat larger scope than Perugino' s. Perugino ' s 
pictures are for the most part religious contempla- 
tions, painted and made visible, to accompany the 
action of divine service — a visible pattern to priests, 
attendants, worshippers, of what the course of their 
invisible thoughts should be at those holy functions. 
Learning in the workshop of Perugino to produce the 
like — such works as the Ansidei Madonna — to pro- 
duce them very much better than his master, Raphael 
was already become a freeman of the most strictly 
religious school of Italian art, the so devout Umbrian 
soul finding there its purest expression, still untroubled 
by the naturalism, the intellectualism, the antique 



32 RAPHAEL 

paganism, then astir in the artistic soul everywhere 
else in Italy. The lovely work of Perugino, very 
lovely at its best, of the early Raphael also, is in fact 
"conservative," and at various points slightly behind 
its day, though not unpleasantly. In Perugino' s 
allegoric frescoes of the Canibio, the Hall of the 
Money-changers, for instance, under the mystic rule 
of the Planets in person, pagan personages take their 
place indeed side by side with the figures of the New 
Testament, but are no Romans or Greeks, neither are 
the Jews Jews, nor is any one of them, warrior, sage, 
king, precisely of Perugino's own time and place, 
but still contemplations only, after the manner of the 
personages in his church-work; or, say, dreams — 
monastic dreams — thin, do-nothing creatures, con- 
jured from sky and cloud. Perugino clearly never 
broke through the meditative circle of the Middle 
Age. 

Now Raphael, on the other hand, in his final period 
at Rome, exhibits a wonderful narrative power in 
painting; and the secret of that power — the power 
of developing a story in a picture, or series of pict- 
ures — may be traced back from him to Pinturicchio, 
as that painter worked on those vast, well-lighted 
walls of the cathedral library at Siena, at the great 
series of frescoes illustrative of the life of Pope Pius 
the Second. It had been a brilliant personal history, 
in contact now and again with certain remarkable 
public events — a career religious yet mundane, you 
scarcely know which, so natural is the blending of 
lights, of interest in it. How unlike the Peruginesque 



RAPHAEL 33 

conception of life in its almost perverse other-world- 
liness, which Raphael now leaves behind him, but, 
like a true scholar, will not forget. Pinturicchio 
then had invited his remarkable young friend hither, 
"to assist him by his counsels," who, however, pupil- 
wise, after his habit also learns much as he thus assists. 
He stands depicted there in person in the scene of 
the canonisation of Saint Catherine; and though his 
actual share in the work is not to be defined, con- 
noisseurs have felt his intellectual presence, not at 
one place only, in touches at once finer and more 
forcible than were usual in the steady-going, some- 
what Teutonic, Pinturicchio, Raphael's elder by thirty 
years. The meek scholar you see again, with his 
tentative sketches and suggestions, had more than 
learned his lesson; through all its changes that flexible 
intelligence loses nothing; does but add continually 
to its store. Henceforward Raphael will be able to 
tell a story in a picture, better, with a truer economy, 
with surer judgment, more naturally and easily than 
any one else. 

And here at Siena, of all Italian towns perhaps 
most deeply impressed with medieval character — an 
impress it still retains — grotesque, parti-coloured — 
parti-coloured, so to speak, in its genius — Satanic, 
yet devout of humour, as depicted in its old chroni- 
cles, and beautiful withal, dignified; it is here that 
Raphael becomes for the first time aware of that old 
pagan world, which had already come to be so much 
for the art-schools of Italy. There were points, as 
we saw, at which the school of Perugia was behind its 



34 RAPHAEL 

day. Amid those intensely Gothic surroundings in 
the cathedral library where Pinturicchio worked, 
stood, as it remained till recently, unashamed there, 
a marble group of the three Graces — an average 
Roman work, in effect — the sort of thing we are used 
to. That, perhaps, is the only reason why for our 
part, except with an effort, we find it conventional or 
even tame. For the youthful Raphael, on the other 
hand, at that moment, antiquity, as with "the dew 
of herbs," seemed therein "to awake and sing" out 
of the dust, in all its sincerity, its cheerfulness and 
natural charm. He has turned it into a picture; has 
helped to make his original only too familiar, perhaps, 
placing the three sisters against his own favourite, so 
unclassic, Umbrian background indeed, but with no 
trace of the Peruginesque ascetic, Gothic meagreness 
in themselves; emphasising rather, with a hearty 
acceptance, the nude, the flesh; making the limbs, 
in fact, a little heavy. It was but one gleam he had 
caught just there in medieval Siena of that large 
pagan world he was, not so long afterwards, more 
completely than others to make his own. And when 
somewhat later he painted the exquisite, still Peru- 
ginesque, Apollo and Marsyas, semi-medieval habits 
again asserted themselves with delightfully blent 
effects. It might almost pass for a parable — that 
little picture in the Louvre — of the contention 
between classic art and the romantic, superseded in 
the person of Marsyas, a homely, quaintly poetical 
young monk, surely! Only, Apollo himself also is 
clearly of the same brotherhood; has a touch, in 



RAPHAEL 35 

truth, of Heine's fancied Apollo "in exile," who, 
Christianity now triumphing, has served as a hired 
shepherd, or hidden himself under the cowl in a 
cloister; and Raphael, as if at work on choir-book or 
missal, still applies symbolical gilding for natural 
sunlight. It is as if he wished to proclaim amid 
newer lights — this scholar who never forgot a lesson 
— his loyal pupilage to Perugino, and retained still 
something of medieval stiffness, of the monastic 
thoughts also, that were born and lingered in places 
like Borgo San Sepolcro or Citta di Castello. Chef- 
Woeuvre! you might exclaim, of the peculiar, tremu- 
lous, half-convinced, monkish treatment of that 
after all damnable pagan world. And our own 
generation certainly, with kindred tastes, loving or 
wishing to love pagan art as sincerely as did the 
people of the Renaissance, and medieval art as well, 
would accept, of course, of work conceived in that 
so seductively mixed manner, ten per cent, of even 
Raphael's later, purely classical presentments. 

That picture was suggested by a fine old intaglio 
in the Medicean collection at Florence, was painted, 
therefore, after Raphael's coming thither, and there- 
fore also a survival with him of a style limited, imma- 
ture, literally provincial; for in the phase of which 
he had now entered he is under the influence of style 
in its most fully determined sense, of what might be 
called the thorough-bass of the pictorial art, of a fully 
realised intellectual system in regard to its processes, 
well tested by experiment, upon a survey of all the 
conditions and various applications of it — of style as 



36 RAPHAEL 

understood by Da Vinci, then at work in Florence. 
Raphael's sojourn there extends from his twenty-first 
to his twenty-fifth year. He came with flattering 
recommendations from the Court of Urbino; was 
admitted as an equal by the masters of his craft, being 
already in demand for work, then and ever since duly 
prized; was, in fact, already famous, though he alone 
is unaware — is in his own opinion still but a learner, 
and as a learner yields himself meekly, systematically 
to influence; would learn from Francia, whom he 
visits at Bologna; from the earlier naturalistic works 
of Masolino and Masaccio; from the solemn prophetic 
work of the venerable dominican, Bartolommeo, dis- 
ciple of Savonarola. And he has already habitually 
this strange effect, not only on the whole body of his 
juniors, but on those whose manner had been long 
since formed; they lose something of themselves by 
contact with him, as if they went to school again. 

Bartolomineo, Da Vinci, were masters certainly of 
what we call ''the ideal" in art. Yet for Raphael, 
so loyal hitherto to the traditions of Umbrian art, to 
its heavy weight of hieratic tradition, dealing still 
somewhat conventionally with a limited, non-natural 
matter — for Raphael to come from Siena, Perugia, 
Urbino, to sharp-witted, practical, masterful Florence 
was in immediate effect a transition from reverie to 
realities — to a world of facts. Those masters of the 
ideal were for him, in the first instance, masters also 
of realism, as we say. Henceforth, to the end, he 
will be the analyst, the faithful reporter, in his work, 
of what he sees. He will realise the function of style 



RAPHAEL 37 

as exemplified in the practice of Da Vinci, face to 
face with the world of nature and man as they are; 
selecting from, asserting one's self in a transcript of 
its veritable data; like drawing to like there, in 
obedience to the master's preference for the embodi- 
ment of the creative form within him. Portrait-art 
had been nowhere in the school of Perugino, but it 
was the triumph of the school of Florence. And here 
a faithful analyst of what he sees, yet lifting it withal, 
unconsciously, inevitably, recomposing, glorifying, 
Raphael too becomes, of course, a painter of portraits. 
We may foresee them already in masterly series, from 
Maddalena Doni, a kind of younger, more virginal 
sister of La Gioconda, to cardinals and popes — to that 
most sensitive of all portraits, the "Violin-player," 
if it be really his. But then, on the other hand, the 
influence of such portraiture will be felt also in his 
inventive work, in a certain reality there, a certain 
convincing loyalty to experience and observation. 
In his most elevated religious work he will still keep, 
for security at least, close to nature, and the truth of 
nature. His modelling of the visible surface is lovely 
because he understands, can see the hidden causes of 
momentary action in the face, the hands — how men 
and animals are really made and kept alive. Set side 
by side, then, with that portrait of Maddalena Doni, 
as forming together a measure of what he has learned 
at Florence, the "Madonna del Gran Duca," which 
still remains there. Call it on revision, and without 
hesitation, the loveliest of his Madonnas, perhaps of 
all Madonnas; and let it stand as representative of 



38 RAPHAEL 

as many as fifty or sixty types of that subject, onwards 
to the Sixtine Madonna, in all the triumphancy of his 
later days at Rome. Observe the veritable atmosphere 
about it, the grand composition of the drapery, the 
magic relief, the sweetness and dignity of the human 
hands and faces, the noble tenderness of Mary's 
gesture, the unity of the thing with itself, the faultless 
exclusion of all that does not belong to its main pur- 
pose; it is like a single, simple axiomatic thought. 
Note withal the novelty of its effect on the mind, and 
you will see that this master of style (that's a con- 
summate example of what is meant by style) has been 
still a willing scholar in the hands of Da Vinci. But 
then, with what ease also, and simplicity, and a sort 
of natural success not his 1 

It was in his twenty-fifth year that Raphael came to 
the city of the popes, Michelangelo being already in 
high favour there. For the remaining years of his 
life he paces the same streets with that grim artist, 
who was so great a contrast with himself, and for the 
first time his attitude towards a gift different from his 
own is not that of a scholar, but that of a rival. If 
he did not become the scholar of Michelangelo, it 
would be difficult, on the other hand, to trace any- 
where in Michelangelo's work the counter influence 
usual with those who had influenced him. It was as 
if he desired to add to the strength of Michelangelo 
that sweetness which at first sight seems to be wanting 
there. Ex forti dtdcedo : and in the study of Michel- 
angelo certainly it is enjoyable to detect, if we may, 
sweet savours amid the wonderful strength, the strange- 



RAPHAEL 39 

ness and potency of what he pours forth for us : with 
Raphael, conversely, something of a relief to find in 
the suavity of that so softly moving, tuneful existence, 
an assertion of strength. There was the promise of 
it, as you remember, in his very look as he saw him- 
self at eighteen; and you know that the lesson, the 
prophecy of those holy women and children he has 
made his own, is that "the meek shall possess." So, 
when we see him at Rome at last, in that atmosphere 
of greatness, of the strong, he too is found putting 
forth strength, adding that element in due proportion 
to the mere sweetness and charm of his genius; yet a 
sort of strength, after all, still congruous with the line 
of development that genius has hitherto taken, the 
special strength of the scholar and his proper reward, 
a purely cerebral strength — the strength, the power 
of an immense understanding. 

Now the life of Raphael at Rome seems as we read 
of it hasty and perplexed, full of undertakings, of 
vast works not always to be completed, of almost 
impossible demands on his industry, in a world of 
breathless competition, amid a great company of 
spectators, for great rewards. You seem to lose him, 
feel he may have lost himself, in the multiplicity of 
his engagements; might fancy that, wealthy, variously 
decorated, a courtier, cardinal in petto, he was "serv- 
ing tables." But, you know, he was forcing into this 
brief space of years (he died at thirty-seven) more 
than the natural business of the larger part of a long 
life; and one way of getting some kind of clearness 
into it, is to distinguish the various divergent outlooks 



40 RAPHAEL 

or applications, and group the results of that immense 
intelligence, that still untroubled, flawlessly operating, 
completely informed understanding, that purely cere- 
bral power, acting through his executive, inventive or 
creative gifts, through the eye and the hand with its 
command of visible colour and form. In that way 
you may follow him along many various roads till 
brain and eye and hand suddenly fail in the very 
midst of his work — along many various roads, 
but you can follow him along each of them dis- 
tinctly. 

At the end of one of them is the Galatea, and in 
quite a different form of industry, the datum for the 
beginnings of a great literary work of pure erudition. 
Coming to the capital of Christendom, he comes also 
for the first time under the full influence of the antique 
world, pagan art, pagan life, and is henceforth an 
enthusiastic archgeologist. On his first coming to 
Rome a papal bull had authorised him to inspect all 
ancient marbles, inscriptions, and the like, with a 
view to their adaptation in new buildings then pro- 
posed. A consequent close acquaintance with an- 
tiquity, with the very touch of it, blossomed literally 
in his brain, and, under his facile hand, in artistic 
creations, of which the Galatea is indeed the con- 
summation. But the frescoes of the Farnese palace, 
with a hundred minor designs, find their place along 
that line of his artistic activity; they do not exhaust 
his knowledge of antiquity, his interest in and control 
of it. The mere fragments of it that still cling to his 
memory would have composed, had he lived longer, 



RAPHAEL 41 

a monumental illustrated survey of the monuments of 
ancient Rome. 

To revive something of the proportionable spirit at 
least of antique building in the architecture of the 
present, came naturally to Raphael as the son of his 
age; and at the end of another of those roads of 
diverse activity stands Saint Peter's, though unfin- 
ished. What a proof again of that immense intelli- 
gence, by which, as I said, the element of strength 
supplemented the element of mere sweetness and 
charm in his work, that at the age of thirty, known 
hitherto only as a painter, at the dying request of the 
venerable Bramante himself, he should have been 
chosen to succeed him as the director of that vast 
enterprise ! And if little in the great church, as we 
see it, is directly due to him, yet we must not forget 
that his work in the Vatican also was partly that of an 
architect. In the Loggie, or open galleries of the 
Vatican, the last and most delicate effects of Quattro- 
tenio taste come from his hand, in that peculiar 
arabesque decoration which goes by his name. 

Saint Peter's, as you know, had an indirect con- 
nexion with the Teutonic reformation. When Leo 
X pushed so far the sale of indulgences to the over- 
throw of Luther's Catholicism, it was done after all 
for the not entirely selfish purpose of providing funds 
to build the metropolitan church of Christendom with 
the assistance of Raphael; and yet, upon another of 
those diverse outways of his so versatile intelligence, 
at the close of which we behold his unfinished picture 
of the Transfiguration, what has been called Raphael's 



42 RAPHAEL 

Bible finds its place — that series of biblical scenes in 
the Loggie of the Vatican. And here, while he has 
shown that he could do something of Michelangelo's 
work a little more soothingly than he, this graceful 
Roman Catholic rivals also what is perhaps best in 
the work of the rude German reformer — of Luther, 
who came to Rome about this very time, to find 
nothing admirable there. Place along with them the 
Cartoons, and observe that in this phase of his artistic 
labour, as Luther printed his vernacular German ver- 
sion of the Scriptures, so Raphael is popularising 
them for an even larger world; he brings the simple, 
to their great delight, face to face with the Bible as 
it is, in all its variety of incident, after they had so 
long had to content themselves with but fragments of 
it, as presented in the symbolism and in the brief 
lections of the Liturgy: — Biblia Fauperufii, in a 
hundred forms of reproduction, though designed 
for popes and princes. 

But then, for the wise, at the end of yet another of 
those divergent ways, glows his painted philosophy in 
the Parnassus and the School of Athens, with their 
numerous accessories. In the execution of those 
works, of course, his antiquarian knowledge stood 
him in good stead; and here, above all, is the pledge 
of his immense understanding, at work on its own 
natural ground on a purely intellectual deposit, the 
apprehension, the transmission to others of complex 
and difficult ideas. We have here, in fact, the sort 
of intelligence to be found in Lessing, in Herder, in 
Hegel, in those who, by the instrumentality of an 



RAPHAEL 43 

organised philosophic system, have comprehended in 
one view or vision what poetry has been, or what 
Greek philosophy, as great complex dynamic facts in 
the world. But then, with the artist of the sixteenth 
century, this synoptic intellectual power worked in 
perfect identity with the pictorial imagination and a 
magic hand. By him large theoretic conceptions 
are addressed, so to speak, to the intelligence of the 
eye. There had been efforts at such abstract or 
theoretic painting before, or say rather, leagues 
behind him. Modern efforts, again, we know, and 
not in Germany alone, to do the like for that larger 
survey of such matters which belongs to the philosophy 
of our own century; but for one or many reasons they 
have seemed only to prove the incapacity of philosophy 
to be expressed in terms of art. They have seemed, 
in short, so far, not fit to be seen literally — those 
ideas of culture, religion, and the like. Yet Plato, 
as you know, supposed a kind of visible loveliness 
about ideas. Well! in Raphael, painted ideas, 
painted and visible philosophy, are for once as 
beautiful as Plato thought they must be, if one truly 
apprehended them. For note, above all, that with 
all his wealth of antiquarian knowledge in detail, and 
with a perfect technique, it is after all the beauty, 
the grace of poetry, of pagan philosophy, of religious 
faith that he thus records. 

Of religious faith also. The Disputa, in which, 
under the form of a council representative of all ages, 
he embodies the idea of theology, divinarum rerum 
notitia, as constantly resident in the Catholic Church, 



44 RAPHAEL 

ranks with the "Parnassus" and the "School of 
Athens," if it does not rather close another of his 
long lines of intellectual travail — a series of compo- 
sitions, partly symbolic, partly historical, in which the 
"Deliverance of St. Peter from Prison," the "Expul- 
sion of the Huns," and the "Coronation of Charle- 
magne," find their places; and by which, painting 
in the great official chambers of the Vatican, Raphael 
asserts, interprets the power and charm of the Catholic 
ideal as realised in history. A scholar, a student of 
the visible world, of the natural man, yet even more 
ardently of the books, the art, the life of the old 
pagan world, the age of the Renaissance, through all 
its varied activity, had, in spite of the weakened hold 
of Catholicism on the critical intellect, been still 
under its influence, the glow of it, as a religious 
ideal, and in the presence of Raphael you cannot 
think it a mere after-glow. Independently, that is, 
of less or more evidence for it, the whole creed of 
the Middle Age, as a scheme of the world as it should 
be, as we should be glad to find it, was still welcome 
to the heart, the imagination. Now, in Raphael, all 
the various conditions of that age discover themselves 
as characteristics of a vivid personal genius, which 
may be said therefore to be conterminous with the 
genius of the Renaissance itself. For him, then, in 
the breadth of his immense cosmopolitan intelligence, 
for Raphael, who had done in part the work of Luther 
also, the Catholic Church — through all its phases, as 
reflected in its visible local centre, the papacy — is 
alive still as of old, one and continuous, and still true 



RAPHAEL 45 

to itself. Ah ! what is local and visible, as you know, 
counts for so much with the artistic temper ! 

Old friends, or old foes with but new faces, events 
repeating themselves, as his large, clear, synoptic 
vision can detect, the invading King of France, Louis 
XII, appears as Attila : Leo X as Leo I : and he thinks 
of, he sees, at one and the same moment, the corona- 
tion of Charlemagne and the interview of Pope Leo 
with Francis I, as a dutiful son of the Church: of 
the deliverance of Leo X from prison, and the deliv- 
erance of St. Peter. 

I have abstained from anything like description of 
Raphael's pictures in speaking of him and his work, 
have aimed rather at preparing you to look at his 
work for yourselves, by a sketch of his life, and 
therein especially, as most appropriate to this place, 
of Raphael as a scholar. And now if, in closing, I 
commend one of his pictures in particular to your 
imagination or memory, your purpose to see it, or see 
it again, it will not be the Transfiguration nor the 
Sixtine Madonna, nor even the " Madonna del Gran 
Duca," but the picture we have in London — the 
Ansidei, or Blenheim, Madonna, I find there, at 
first sight, with something of the pleasure one has in 
a proposition of Euclid, a sense of the power of the 
understanding, in the economy with which he has 
reduced his material to the simplest terms, has dis- 
entangled and detached its various elements. He is 
painting in Florence, but for Perugia, and sends it a 
specimen of its own old art — Mary and the babe 
enthroned, with St. Nicolas and the Baptist in atten- 



46 RAPHAEL 

dance on either side. The kind of thing people there 
had already seen so many times, but done better, in 
a sense not to be measured by degrees, with a wholly 
original freedom and life and grace, though he per- 
haps is unaware, done better as a whole, because 
better in every minute particular, than ever before. 
The scrupulous scholar, aged twenty-three, is now 
indeed a master; but still goes carefully. Note, 
therefore, how much mere exclusion counts for in the 
positive effect of his work. There is a saying that 
the true artist is known best by what he omits. Yes, 
because the whole question of good taste is involved 
precisely in such jealous omission. Note this, for 
instance, in the familiar Apennine background, with 
its blue hills and brown towns, faultless, for once — 
for once only — and observe, in the Umbrian pictures 
around, how often such background is marred by 
grotesque, natural, or architectural detail, by incon- 
gruous or childish incident. In this cool, pearl-grey, 
quiet place, where colour tells for double — the jew- 
elled cope, the painted book in the hand of Mary, 
the chaplet of red coral — one is reminded that among 
all classical writers Raphael's preference was for the 
faultless Virgil. How orderly, how divinely clean 
and sweet the flesh, the vesture, the floor, the earth 
and sky ! Ah, say rather the hand, the method of the 
painter ! There is an unmistakeable pledge of strength, 
of movement and animation in the cast of the Bap- 
tist's countenance, but reserved, repressed. Strange, 
Raphael has given him a staff of transparent crystal. 
Keep then to that picture as the embodied formula 



RAPHAEL 47 

of Raphael's genius. Amid all he has here already 
achieved, full, we may think, of the quiet assurance 
of what is to come, his attitude is still that of the 
scholar; he seems still to be saying, before all things, 
from first to last, " I am utterly purposed that I will 
not offend." 



PASCAL/ 

About the middle of the seventeenth century, two 
opposite views of a question, upon which neither 
Scripture, nor Council, nor Pope, had spoken with 
authority — the question as to the amount of freedom 
left to man by the overpowering work of divine grace 
upon him — had seemed likely for a moment to divide 
the Roman Church into two rival sects. In the 
diocese of Paris, however, the controversy narrowed 
itself into a mere personal quarrel between Ihe Jesuit 
Fathers and the religious community of Poit-Royal, 
and might have been forgotten but for the intervention 
of a new writer in whom French literature made more 
than a new step. ' It became at once, as if by a new 
creation, what it has remained — a pattern of abso- 
lutely unencumbered expressiveness. 

In 1656 Pascal, then thirty- three years old, under 
the form of " Letters to a Provincial by one of his 
Friends," put forth a series of pamphlets in which 
all that was vulnerable in the Jesuit Fathers was laid 
bare to the profit of their opponents. At the moment 

1 Published in the Contemporary Review, Feb. 1895, and now 
reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors. 
48 



PASCAL 49 

the quarrel turned on the proposed censure of Antoine 
Arnauld by the Sorbonne, by the University of Paris 
as a religious body. Pascal, intimate, like many 
another fine intellect of the day, with the Port- 
Royalists, was Arnauld' s friend, and it belonged to 
the ardour of his genius, at least as he was then, to 
be a very active friend. He took up the pen as other 
chivalrous gentlemen of the day took up the sword, 
and showed himself a master of the art of fence there- 
with. His delicate exercise of himself with that 
weapon was nothing less than a revelation to all the 
world of the capabilities, the true genius of the French 
language in prose. 

Those who think of Pascal in his final sanctity, his 
detachment of soul from all but the greatest matters, 
may be surprised, when they turn to the "Letters," 
to find him treating questions, as serious for the 
friends he was defending as for their adversaries, 
ironically, with a but half-veiled disdain for them, or 
an affected humility at being unskilled in them and 
no theologian. He does not allow us to forget that 
he is, after all, a layman; while he introduces us, 
almost avowedly, into a world of unmeaning terms, 
and unreal distinctions and suppositions that can 
never be verified. The world in general, indeed, se 
paye des paroles. That saying belongs to Pascal, and 
he uses it with reference to the Jesuits and their 
favourite expression of "sufficient grace." In the 
earliest " Letters " he creates in us a feeling that, how- 
ever orthodox one's intention, it is scarcely possible 
to speak of the matters then so abundantly discussed 



50 PASCAL 

by religious people without heresy at some unguarded 
point. The suspected proposition of Arnauld, it is 
admitted by one of his foes, "would be Catholic in 
the mouth of any one but M. Arnauld. " " The truth, " 
as it lay between Arnauld and his opponents, is a 
thing so delicate that "pourpeu qn'on s'en retire, on 
tombe dans Verreur ; niais cette erreur est si deliee, 
que, pour peu qti" on s^en eloigne, on se trouve dans la 
verite.^^ 

Some, indeed, may find in the very delicacy, the 
curiosity, with which such distinctions are drawn, by 
Pascal's friends as well as by their foes, only the 
impertinence, the profanities, of the theologian by 
profession, all too intimate in laying down the law of 
the things he dealswith — the things ''which eye hath 
not seen " — pressing into the secrets of God's sublime 
commerce with men, in which, it may be, He differs 
with every single human soul, by forms of thought 
adapted from the poorest sort of men's dealings with 
each other, from the trader, or the attorney. Pascal 
notes too the " impious buffooneries " of his oppo- 
nents. The good Fathers, perhaps, only meant them 
to promote geniality of temper in the debate. But 
of such failures — failures of taste, of respect towards 
one's own point of view — the world is ever unamiably 
aware; and in the "Letters " there is much to move 
the self-complacent smile of the worldling, as Pascal 
describes his experiences, while he went from one 
authority to another to find out what was really meant 
by the distinction between grace "sufificient," grace 
"efficacious," grace "active," grace "victorious." 



PASCAL 51 

He heard, for instance, that all men have sufficient 
grace to do God's will; but it is not dil^z.ys prochain, 
not always at hand, at the moment of temptation to 
do otherwise. So far, then, Pascal's charges are those 
which may seem to lie ready to hand against all who 
study theology, a looseness of thought and language, 
that would pass nowhere else, in making what are 
professedly very fine distinctions; the insincerity 
with which terms are carefully chosen to cover oppo- 
site meanings; the fatuity with which opposite mean- 
ings revolve into one another, in the strange vacuous 
atmosphere generated by professional divines. 

Up to this point, you see, Pascal is the countryman 
of Rabelais and Montaigne, smiling with the fine 
malice of the one, laughing outright with the gaiety 
of the other, all the world joining in the laugh — well, 
at the silliness of the clergy, who seem indeed not to 
know their own business. It is we, the laity, he 
would urge, who are serious, and disinterested, be- 
cause sincerely interested, in these great questionings. 
Jalousie de metier, the reader may suspect, has some- 
thing to do with the professional leaders on both sides 
of the controversy; but at the actual turn controversy 
took just then, it was against the Jesuit Fathers that 
Pascal's charges came home in full force. And their 
sin is above all that sin, unpardonable with men of 
the world sans peur et sans reproche, of a lack of 
self-respect, sins against pride, if the paradox may 
be allowed, all the undignified faults, in a word, of 
essentially little people when they interfere in great 
matters — faults promoted in the direction of the 



52 PASCAL 

consciences of women and children, weak concessions 
to weak people who want to be saved in some easy 
way quite other than Pascal's high, fine, chivalrous 
way of gaining salvation, an incapacity to say what 
one thinks with the glove thrown down. He sup- 
poses a Jansenist to turn upon his opponent who uses 
the term "sufficient" grace, while really meaning, as 
he alleges, insufficient, with the words : " Your explana- 
tion would be odious to men of the world. They 
speak more sincerely than you on matters of far less 
importance than this." With the world, Pascal, in 
the "Provincial Letters," had immediate success. 
"All the world," we read in his friend's supposed 
reply to the second "Letter," "sees them; all the 
world understands them. Men of the world find them 
agreeable, and even women intelligible." A century 
later Voltaire found them very agreeable. The spirit 
in which Pascal deals with his opponents, his irony, 
may remind us of the "Apology" of Socrates; the 
style which secured them immediate access to people 
who, as a rule, find the subjects there treated hope- 
lessly dry, reminds us of the "Apologia " of Newman. 
The essence of all good style, whatever its accidents 
may be, is expressiveness. It is mastered in proportion 
to the justice, the nicety with which words balance 
or match their meaning, and their writer succeeds in 
saying what he wills, grave or gay, severe or florid, 
simple or complex. Pascal was a master of style 
because, as his sister tells us, recording his earliest 
years, he had a wonderful natural facility a dire ce 
qii* il voulait en la vianiere qu^il voulait. 



PASCAL 53 

Facit indignatio versus. The indignation which 
caused Pascal to write the " Letters " was of a super- 
cilious kind, and what he willed to say in them led to 
the development of all those qualities that are summed 
up in the French term Pesprit. Voltaire declared 
that the best comedies of Moliere n'' ont pas plus de 
sel que les p7-emieres lettres. " Vos inaximes,'' Pascal 
assures the Jesuit Fathers, " ont j'e ne sais quoi de 
divertissafit, qui rejouit toujour s le 7nonde," and they 
lose nothing of that character in his handling of them, 
so much so that it was clear from the first that the 
world in general would never ask whether Pascal had 
been quite fair to his opponents: "N'etes-vous done 
pas ridicules, vies Peres? Qu''on satisfait au pre- 
cepie d^otiir la viesse en entendant quatre quarts de 
messe a la/ois de differents pretres ! " When you have 
the like of that it is impossible not to laugh, paree 
que Hen n''y porte davantage quUme disproportion 
surprenante entre ce qu'on attend et ce qu^on voit. 

He has " salt " also, of another kind. He drives 
straight at the Jesuits, for instance, rather than at 
those who do but copy them, because, as he tells us ; 
Les choses valent toujours mieux dans leur source. 
What equity of expression, how brief, how untrans- 
lateable ! And the " Letters " abound in such things. 

But to his comparison of Pascal with Moliere, 
Voltaire added that Bossuet n'a rien de plus subli?ne 
que les dernieres. And in truth the more serious note 
of the impassioned servant of religion whose lips 
have been touched with altar-fire, whose seriousness 
came to be like some incurable malady, a visitation 



54 PASCAL 

of God, as people used to say, is presently struck 
when, in the natural course of his argument, his 
thoughts are carried, from a mere passage of arms 
between one man or one class of men and another, 
deep down to those awful encounters of the individual 
soul with itself which are formulated in the eternal 
problem of predestination. 

In their doctrine of "sufficient grace" the Jesuits 
had presented a view of the conflict of good and evil 
in the soul, which is honourable to God and encour- 
aging to man, and which has catholicity on its face. 
All to whom entrance into the Church, through its 
formal ministries, lies open are truly called of God, 
while beyond it stretches the ocean of " His uncove- 
nanted mercies." That is a doctrine for the many, 
for those whose position in the religious life is medi- 
ocrity, who so far as themselves or others can discern 
have nothing about them of eternal or necessary or 
irresistible reprobation, or of the eternal condition 
opposite to that. 

The so-called Jansenist doctrine, on the other 
hand, of [ ] but irresistible grace was the 

appropriate view of the Port- Royalists, high-pitched, 
eager souls as they were, and of their friend Pascal 
himself, however much in his turn he might refine 
upon it. Whether or not, as a matter of fact, upon 
which, as distinct from matters of faith, an infallible 
pope can be mistaken, the dreary old Dutch bishop 
Jansenius had really taught Jansenism, the Port- 
Royalists had found in his " Augustinus " an incentive 
to devotion, and were avowedly his adherents. In 



PASCAL 55 

that somewhat gloomy, that too deeply impressed, 
that fanatical age, they were the Calvinists of the 
Roman Catholic Church, maintaining, emphasising 
in it a view, a tradition, really constant in it from 
St. Augustin, from St. Paul himself. It is a merit of 
Pascal, his literary merit, to have given a very fine- 
toned expression to that doctrine, though mainly in 
the way of a criticism of its opponents, to one side 
or aspect of an eternal controversy, eternally sus- 
pended, as representing two opposite aspects of ex- 
perience itself. Calvin and Arminius, Jansen and 
Molina sum up, in fact, respectively, like the respective 
adherents of the freedom or of the necessity of the 
human will, in the more general question of moral 
philosophy, two opposed, two counter trains of phe- 
nomena actually observable by us in human action, 
too large and complex a matter, as it is, to be 
embodied or summed up in any one single proposi- 
tion or idea. 

There are moments of one's own life, aspects of the 
life of others, of which the conclusion that the will is 
free seems to be the only — is the natural or reasonable 
— account. Yet those very moments on reflexion, on 
second thoughts, present themselves again, as but 
links in a chain, in an all-embracing network of 
chains. In all education we assume, in some inex- 
plicable combination, at once the freedom and the 
necessity of the subject of it. And who on a survey 
of life from outside would willingly lose the dra- 
matic contrasts, the alternating interests, for which 
the opposed ideas of freedom and necessity are our 



56 PASCAL 

respective points of view? How significant become 
the details we might otherwise pass by almost unob- 
served, but to which we are put on the alert by the 
abstract query whether a man be indeed a freeman or 
a slave, as we watch from aside his devious course, 
his struggles, his final tragedy or triumph. So much 
value at least there may be in problems insoluble in 
themselves, such as that great controversy of Pascal's 
day between Jesuit and Jansenist. And here again 
who would forego, in the spectacle of the religious 
history of the human soul, the aspects, the details 
which the doctrines of universal and particular grace 
respectively embody? The Jesuit doctrine of suf- 
ficient grace is certainly, to use the familiar expres- 
sion, a very pleasant doctrine conducive to the due 
feeding of the whole flock of Christ, as being, as 
assuming them to be, what they really are, at the 
worst, God's silly sheep. It has something in it 
congruous with the rising of the physical sun on the 
evil and on the good, while the wheat and the tares 
grow naturally, peacefully together. But how pleasant 
also the opposite doctrine, how true, how truly de- 
scriptive of certain distinguished, magnifical, or elect 
souls, vessels of election, epris des hauteurs, as we 
see them pass across the world's stage, as if led on 
by a kind of thirst for God ! Its necessary counter- 
part, of course, we may find, at least dramatically true 
of some ; we can name them in history, perhaps from 
our own experience; souls of whom it seems but an 
obvious story to tell that they seemed to be in love 
with eternal death, to have borne on them from the 



PASCAL 57 

first signs of reprobation. Of certain quite visibly 
elect souls, at all events, the theory of irresistible grace 
might seem the almost necessary explanation. Most 
reasonable, most natural, most truly is it descriptive 
of Pascal himself. 

So far, indeed, up to the year 1656, Pascal's a^utus 
mirabilis, the year of the "Letters," the world had 
been allowed to see only one side of him. Early in 
life he had achieved brilliant overtures in the abstract 
sciences, and, inheriting much of the quality of a fine 
gentleman, he figures, with his trenchant manner, 
never at a loss, as a quite secular person, stirred on 
occasion to take part in a religious debate. But it is 
after the grand fashion of the mundane quarrels of 
that day, the age of the sentiment of personal honour, 
in which it was so natural for the good-natured Jesuits, 
stirring all Pascal's satiric power, to excuse as well as 
they could the act de ticer pour 2111 simple medisatice. 
The Church was still an estate of the realm with all 
the obligations of the noblesse, and it was still some- 
thing worse than bad taste, it was dangerous to express 
religious doubts. About the Catholic religion, as he 
conceived it, Pascal displays the assured attitude of 
an ancient Crusader. He has the full courage of his 
opinions, and by his elegant easy gallantry in speaking 
for it he gives to religion then and now a kind of 
dignity it had lost with other controversialists in the 
eyes of the world. There is abundant gaiety also in 
the "Letters." He quotes from Tertullian to the 
effect that c'' est proprement a la verite qu'il appartient 
de rire parce qu^elle est gate, et de se jouer de ses 



58 PASCAL 

ennemis parce qu' elle est assuree de sa victorie. For 
he could find quotations to his purpose from recondite 
writers, though he was not a man of erudition; like 
a man of the world again, he read little, but that 
absorbingly, was the master of two authors, Epictetus 
and Montaigne, and, as appeared afterwards, of the 
Scriptures in the Vulgate. 

So far, his imposing carriage of himself intellectu- 
ally might lead us to suspect that the forced humilities 
of his later years are indirectly a discovery of what 
seems one leading quality of the natural man in him, 
a pride that could be quite fierce on occasion. And, 
like another rich young man whom Jesus loved, he 
lacked nothing to make the world also love and con- 
fide in, as it already flattered, him. He turned from 
it, decided to live a single life. Was it the mere 
oddity of genius? Or its last fine dainty touch of 
difference from ordinary people and their motives? 
Or that sanctity of which, in some cases, the world 
itself instinctively feels the distinction, though it 
shrinks from the true explanation of it? Certainly, 
all things considered, on the morrow of the " Letters," 
Blaise Pascal, at the age of thirty-three, had a brilliant 
worldly future before him, had he cared duly to wait 
upon, to serve it. To develop the already consider- 
able position of his family among the gentry of 
Auvergne would have been to follow the way of his 
time, in which so many noble names had been founded 
on professional talents. Increasingly, however, from 
early youth, he had been the subject of a malady so 
hopeless and inexplicable that in that superstitious 



PASCAL 59 

age some fancied it the result of a malign spell in 
infancy. Gradually, the world almost loses sight of 
him, hears at last, some time after it had looked for 
that event, that he had died, of course very piously, 
among those sombre people, his friends and relations 
of Port-Royal, with whom he had taken refuge, and 
seemed already to have been buried alive. And in 
the year 1670, not till eight years after his death, the 
** Pensees " appeared — " Pens^es de M. Pascal sur la 
Religion et sur quelques autres sujets " — or rather a 
selection from those "Thoughts " by the Port- Royal- 
ists, still in fear of consequences to the struggling 
Jansenist party, anxious to present Pascal's doctrine 
as far as possible in conformity with the Jesuit sense, 
as also to divert the vaguer parts of it more entirely 
into their own. The incomparable words were 
altered, the order changed or lost, the thoughts them- 
selves omitted or retrenched. Written in short inter- 
vals of relief from suffering, they were contributions 
to a large and methodical work — " Pensees de M. 
Pascal sur la Religion et sur quelques autres sujets " 
— on a good many things besides, as the reader finds, 
on many of the great things of this world which 
seemed to him to come in contact or competition 
with religion. In the true version of the *' Thoughts, " 
edited at last by Faugere, in 1844, from Pascal's own 
MSS., in the National Library, they group themselves 
into certain definite trains of speculation and study. 
But it is still, nevertheless, as isolated thoughts, as 
inspirations, so to call them, penetrating what seemed 
hopelessly dark, summarising what seemed hopelessly 



60 PASCAL 

confused, sticking fast in men's memories, floating 
lightly, or going far, that they have left so deep a 
mark in literature. For again the manner, also, their 
style precisely becomes them. The merits of Pascal's 
style, indeed, as of the French language itself, still 
is to say beaucotip de choses en peu de mots ; and the 
brevity, the discerning edge, the impassioned concen- 
tration of the language are here one with the ardent 
immediate apprehensions of his spirit. 

One of the literary merits of the "Provincial 
Letters" is that they are really like letters; they are 
essentially a conversation by writing with other per- 
sons. What we have in the "Thoughts" is the con- 
versation of the writer with himself, with himself 
and with God, or rather concerning Him, for He is, 
in Pascal's favourite phrase from the Vulgate, Deus 
ahsconditus, He who never directly shows Himself. 
Choses de coijir the "Thoughts" are, indeed those of 
an individual, though they seem to have determined 
the very outlines of a great subject for all other per- 
sons. In Pascal, at the summit of the Puy de Dome 
in his native Auvergne, experimenting on the weight 
of the invisible air, proving it to be ever all around 
by its effects, we are presented with one of the more 
pleasing aspects of his earlier, more wholesome, open- 
air life. In the great work of which the "Thoughts " 
are the first head, Pascal conceived himself to be 
doing something of the same kind in the spiritual 
order by a demonstration of this other invisible world 
all around us, with its really ponderable forces, its 
movement, its attractions and repulsions, the world 



PASCAL 61 

of grace, unseen, but, as he thinks, the one only 
hypothesis that can explain the experienced, admitted 
facts. Whether or not he was fixing permanently in 
the "Pens^es " the outlines, the principles, of a great 
system of assent, of conviction, for acceptance by the 
intellect, he was certainly fixing these with all the 
imaginative depth and sufficiency of Shakespeare 
himself, the fancied opposites, the attitudes, the 
necessary forms of TrdOos, of a great tragedy in the 
heart, the soul, the essential human tragedy, as typical 
and central in its expression here, as Hamlet — what 
the soul passes, and must pass, through, aux abois 
with nothingness, or with those offended mysterious 
powers that may really occupy it — or when confronted 
with the thought of what are called the "four last 
things " it yields this way or that. What might have 
passed with all its fiery ways for an esprit de secte et 
de cabale is now revealed amid the disputes not of a 
single generation but of eternal ones, by the light of 
a phenomenal storm of blinding and blasting inspira- 
tions. 

Observe, he is not a sceptic converted, a returned 
infidel, but is seen there as if at the very centre of a 
perpetually maintained tragic crisis holding the faith 
steadfastly, but amid the well-poised points of essen- 
tial doubt all around him and it. It is no mere calm 
supersession of a state of doubt by a state of faith; 
the doubts never die, they are only just kept down in 
a perpetual agonia. Everywhere in the "Letters" 
he had seemed so great a master — a master of himself 
— never at a loss, taking the conflict so lightly, with 



62 PASCAL 

so light a heart : in the great Atlantean travail of the 
"Thoughts" his feet sometimes "are almost gone." 
In his soul's agony, theological abstractions seem to 
become personal powers. It was as if just below the 
surface of the green undulations, the stately woods, 
of his own strange country of Auvergne, the volcanic 
fires had suddenly discovered themselves anew. In 
truth into his typical diagnosis, as it may seem, of 
the tragedy of the human soul, there have passed not 
merely the personal feelings, the temperament of an 
individual, but his malady also, a physical malady. 
Great genius, we know, has the power of elevating, 
transmuting, serving itself by the accidental condi- 
tions about it, however unpromising — poverty, and 
the like. It was certainly so with Pascal's long-con- 
tinued physical sufferings. That aigreiir, which is 
part of the native colour of Pascal's genius, is rein- 
forced in the "Pens^es" by insupportable languor, 
alternating with supportable pain, as he died little 
by little through the eight years of their composition. 
They are essentially the utterance of a soul malade — 
a soul of great genius, whose malady became a new 
quality of that genius, perfecting it thus, by its very 
defect, as a type on the intellectual stage, and thereby 
guiding, reassuring sympathetically, manning by a 
sense of good company that large class of persons who 
are malade in the same way. ^^ La maladie est Vetat 
naturel des Chretiens,''^ says Pascal himself. And we 
concede that every one of us more or less is ailing 
thus, as another has told us that life itself is a disease 
of the spirit. 



PASCAL 63 

From Port- Royal also came, about the year 1670, 
a painful book, the "Life of Pascal," a portrait 
painted slowly from the life or living death, but with 
an almost exclusive preference for traits expressive of 
disease. The post-mortem examination of Pascal's 
brain revealed, we are now told, the secret, not 
merely of that long prostration, those sudden passing 
torments, but of something analogous to them in 
Pascal's genius and work. Well! the light cast 
indirectly on the literary work of Pascal by Mme. 
P^rier's " Life " is of a similar kind. It is a veritable 
chapter in morbid pathology, though it may have 
truly a beauty for experts, the beauty which belongs 
to all refined cases even of cerebral disturbance. 
That he should have sought relief from his singular 
wretchedness, in that sombre company, is like the 
second stroke of tragedy upon him. At moments 
Pascal becomes almost a sectarian, and seems to pass 
out of the genial broad heaven of the Catholic Church. 
He had lent himself in those last years to a kind of 
pieties which do not make a winning picture, which 
always have about them, even when they show them- 
selves in men physically strong, something of the 
small compass of the sick-chamber. His medieval 
or oriental self-tortures, all the painful efforts at 
absolute detachment, a perverse asceticism taking all 
there still was to spare from the denuded and suffering 
body, might well, you may think, have died with 
him, but are here recorded, chiefly by way of showing 
the world, the Jesuits, that the Jansenists, too, had a 
saint quite after their mind. 



64 PASCAL 

But though, at first sight, you may find a pettiness 
in those minute pieties, they have their signification 
as a testimony to the wholeness of Pascal's assent, 
the entirety of his submission, his immense sincerity, 
the heroic grandeur of his achieved faith. The 
seventeenth century presents survivals of the gloomy 
mental habits of the Middle Age, but for the most 
part of a somewhat theatrical kind, imitations of 
Francis and Dominic or of their earlier imitators. 
In Pascal they are original, and have all their serious- 
ness. Que je fi' en sot's jamais separe — pas separe 
eternellement, he repeats, or makes that strange sort 
of MS. amulet, of which his sister tells us, repeat for 
him. Cast me not away from Thy preseiice ; and take 
not Thy Holy Spirit from me. It is table rase he is 
trying to make of himself, that He might reign there 
absolutely alone, who, however, as he was bound to 
think, had made and blest all those things he declined 
to accept. Deeper and deeper, then, he retreated 
into the renuncient life. He could not, had he 
wished, deprive himself of that his greatest gift — 
literally a gift he might have thought it not to be 
buried but acounted for — the gift of le beau dire, of 
writing beautifully. "// avoit renonce depuis long- 
temps aux sciences purement hntnains.^^ To him who 
had known them so well, and as if by intuition, those 
abstract and perdurable forms of service might well 
have seemed a part of ''the Lord's doing, marvellous 
in our eyes," as his favourite Psalm cxix, the psalm 
des petites heiires, the cxviii of the Vulgate, says.'' 

1 The words here cited are, however, from Psalm cxviii, the cxvii 
of the Vulgate, and not from Pascal's favourite Psalm. (C.L.S.) 



PASCAL 65 

These, too, he counts now as but a variety of le neant 
and vanity of things. He no longer records, there- 
fore, the mathematical apergus that may visit him; 
and in his scruples, his suspicions of visible beauty, 
he interests us as precisely an inversion of what is 
called the aesthetic life. 

Yet his faith, as in the days of the Middle Age, 
had been supported, rewarded, by what he believed 
to be visible miracle among the strange lights and 
shades of that retired place. Pascal's niece, the 
daughter of Madame P^rier, a girl ten years of age, 
suffered from a disease of the eyes pronounced to be 
incurable. The disease was a peculiarly distressing 
one, the sort of affliction which, falling on a young 
child, may lead one to question the presence of divine 
justice in the world, makes one long that miracles 
were possible. Well ! Pascal, for one, believed that 
on occasion that profound aspiration had been fol- 
lowed up by the power desired. A thorn from the 
crown of Jesus, as was believed, had been lately 
brought to the Port-Royal du Faubourg S. Jacques in 
Paris, and was one day applied devoutly to the eye of 
the suffering child. What followed was an immediate 
and complete cure, fully attested by experts. Ah / 
Thou hast given him his heart'' s desire : ajid hast not 
denied him the request of his lips. Pascal, and the 
young girl herself, faithfully to the end of a long life, 
believed the circumstances to have been miraculous. 
Otherwise, we do not see that Pascal was ever per- 
mitted to enjoy (so to speak) the religion for which 
he had exchanged so much; that the sense of accept- 

F 



66 PASCAL 

ance, of assurance, had come to him; that for him 
the Spouse had ever penetrated the veil of the ordinary 
routine of the means of grace; nothing that corre- 
sponded as a matter of clear personal intercourse of 
the very senses to the greatness of his surrender — 
who had emptied himself of all other things. Besides, 
there was some not wholly-explained delay in his 
reception, in those his last days, of the Sacrament. 
It was brought to him just in time — *' Void celui que 
vous avez tant desire'^ — the ministrant says to the 
dying man. Pascal was then aged thirty-nine — an 
age you may remember fancifully noted as fatal to 
genius. 

Pascal's "Thoughts," then, we shall not rightly 
measure but as the outcome, the utterance, of a soul 
diseased, a soul permanently ill at ease. We find in 
their constant tension something of insomnia, of that 
sleeplessness which can never be a quite healthful 
condition of mind in a human body. Sometimes 
they are cries, cries of obscure pain rather than 
thoughts — those great fine sayings which seem to 
betray by their depth of sound the vast unseen hollow 
places of nature, of humanity, just beneath one's feet 
or at one's side. Reading them, so modern still are 
those thoughts, so rich and various in suggestion, that 
one seems to witness the mental seed-sowing of the 
next two centuries, and perhaps more, as to those 
matters with which he concerns himself. Intuitions 
of a religious genius, they may well be taken also as 
the final considerations of the natural man, as a 
religious inquirer on doubt and faith, and their place 



PASCAL 67 

in things. Listen now to some of these "Thoughts " 
taken at random : taken at first for their brevity, 
Peti de chose nous console, parce que peu de chose nous 
ajfflige. Par Vespace Punivers me comprend et m^en- 
glouHt comme un point : par la petisee j'e le comprends. 
Things like these put us en route with Pascal. Toutes 
les bonnes maximes sont dans le monde : on ne manque 
que de les appliquer. The great ascetic was always 
hard on amusements, on mere pastimes : Le divertis- 
sement nous amuse, one and all of us, et nous fait 
ari'iver insensiblement a la mort. Nous perdons eficore 
la vie avecjoie, pourvu qu'on en park. On ne pent 
/aire tme bonne physionomie (in a portrait) qti'en 
accordant toutes nos contrarietes. L'homme n''est 
qu^un rosean, le plus foible de la nature, mais c'' est un 
roseau pensant. II ne faut pas que P univers entier 
s^arme pour Tecraser. Une vapeur, une goutte d''eau, 
suffit pour le tuer. Mais quand V univers V ecraseroit, 
rhomme seroit encore plus noble que se qui le tue, parce 
quHl sail quHl meurt, et Vavantage que P univers a sur 
lui, Punivers n''en sail rien. It is not thought by 
which that excels, but the convincing force of imagi- 
nation which sublimates its very triteness. Toute 
notre dignite consiste done en la pensee. 

There, then, you have at random the sort of stuff of 
which the "Pens^es " are made. Let me now briefly 
indicate, also by quotation again, some of the main 
leading tendencies in them. La chose la plus impor- 
tante a toute la vie c'' est la choix du metier : le hasard 
en dispose. There we recognise the manner of thought 
of Montaigne. Now one of the leading interests in 



68 PASCAL 

the study of Pascal is to trace the influence upon 
him of the typical sceptic of the preceding century. 
Pascal's "Thoughts " we shall never understand unless 
we realise the under-texture in them of Montaigne's 
very phrases, the fascination the "Essays" had for 
Pascal in his capacity of one of the children of light, 
as giving a veritable compte rendu of the Satanic 
course of this world since the Fall, set forth with 
all the persuasiveness, the power and charm, all the 
gifts of Satan, the veritable light on things he has 
at his disposal. 

Pascal re-echoes Montaigne then in asserting the 
paradoxical character of man and his experience. 
The old headings under which the Port-Royalist 
editors grouped the " Thoughts " recall the titles of 
Montaigne's "Essays" — "Of the Disproportion of 
Man," and the like. As strongly as Montaigne he 
delights in asserting the relative, local, ephemeral 
and merely provisional character of our ideas of 
law, vice, virtue, happiness, and so forth. Comme la 
mode fait ragrhnent aiissi fait-elle la justice. La 
justice et la verite sojit deux poifites si subfiles, qiie 
nos instruments sotit trap mousses pour y toucher 
exactement. Bien suivant la seule raison n'' est juste 
de soi : tout branle avec le temps. Sometimes he 
strikes the express accent of Montaigne: Ceux qui 
sont da?is un vaisseau croient que ceux qui sont au 
bord fuient. Le langage est pareil de tous cotes. II 
faut avoir un point jixe pour en juger. Le port juge 
ceux qui sont dans un vaisseau, mais ou prendrons- 
nous un port dans la morale ? At times he seems to 



PASCAL 69 

forget that he himself and Montaigne are after all not 
of the same flock, as his mind grazes in those pleasant 
places. Qii'il (man) se regarde comme egare dans ce 
canton detourne de la nature, et de ce petit cachot oh il 
se trouve loge, qii' il appremie the earth, et soi-mhne a 
son Juste prix. II faudrait avoir une regie. La raison 
s^ off re, mais elk est ployable a tous sens; et ainsi il 
li'y en a point. Un mhne sens change selon les paroles 
qui V expriment. He has touches even of what he 
calls the malignity, the malign irony of Montaigne. 
Rien que la viediocrite n^est bon, he says, — epris des 
hauteurs, as he so conspicuously was — C'est sortir 
de Phumanite que de sortir du milieu ; la grandeur de 
r dme humaine consiste a savoir s'y tenir. Rien ne 
fo7-tifie plus le pyrrhonisme — that is ever his word for 
scepticism — que ce qit'il y en a qui ne sont pas pyr- 
rhoniens : si tous etaient ils auraient tort. You may 
even credit him, like Montaigne, with a somewhat 
Satanic intimacy with the ways, the cruel ways, the 
weakness, lachete, of the human heart, so that, as he 
says of Montaigne, himself too might be a pernicious 
study for those who have a native tendency to cor- 
ruption. 

The paradoxical condition of the world, the natural 
inconsistency of man, his strange blending of mean- 
ness with ancient greatness, the caprices of his status 
here, of his power and attainments, in the issue of 
his existence — that is what the study of Montaigne 
had enforced on Pascal as the sincere compte rendu 
of experience. But then he passes at a tangent from 
the circle of the great sceptic's apprehension. That 



70 PASCAL 

prospect of man and the world, undulant, capricious, 
inconsistent, contemptible, Idche, full of contradic- 
tion, with a soul of evil in things good, irreducible 
to law, upon which, after all, Montaigne looks out 
with a complacency so entire, fills Pascal with terror. 
It is the world on the morrow of a great catastrophe, 
the casual forces of which have by no means spent 
themselves. Yes! this world we see, of which we 
are a part, with its thousand dislocations, is precisely 
what we might expect as resultant from the Fall of 
Man, with consequences in full working still. It 
presents the appropriate aspect of a lost world, though 
with beams of redeeming grace about it, those, too, 
distributed somewhat capriciously to chosen people 
and elect souls, who, after all, can have but an ill 
time of it here. Under the tragic eclairs of divine 
wrath essentially implacable, the gently pleasantly 
undulating, sunny, earthly prospect of poor loveable 
humanity which opens out for one in Montaigne's 
"Essays," becomes for Pascal a scene of harsh preci- 
pices, of threatening heights and depths — the depths 
of his own nothingness. Vanity : nothingness : these 
are his catchwords: Nous sommes incapables et du 
vrai et du bien ; nous sommes tons condamnes. Ce 
qui y parait (i.e., what we see in the world) ne marque 
ni tine exclusion totale ni tine presence manifeste de 
divinite, mais la presence dUin Dieu qui se cache: 
{Deus absconditus, that is a recurrent favourite thought 
of his) tout porte ce caractere. In this world of 
abysmal dilemmas, he is ready to push all things to 
their extremes. All or nothing; for him real morality 



PASCAL 71 

will be nothing short of sanctity. En Jesus Christ 
toutes les contradictions sont accordees. Yet what 
difficulties again in the religion of Christ! Nulle 
autre religion n^a propose de se hair. La seule religion 
contraire a la nature, contraire au sens commun, est 
la seule qui ait toujours ete. 

Multitudes in every generation have felt at least 
the aesthetic charm of the rites of the Catholic Church. 
For Pascal, on the other hand, a certain weariness, a 
certain puerility, a certain unprofitableness in them 
is but an extra trial of faith. He seems to have little 
sense of the beauty of holiness. And for his sombre, 
trenchant, precipitous philosophy there could be no 
middle terms; irresistible election, irresistible repro- 
bation; only sometimes extremes meet, and again it 
may be the trial of faith that the justified seem as 
loveless and unlovely as the reprobate. Abetissez- 
vous / A nature, you may think, that wouM magnify 
things to the utmost, nurse, expand them beyond 
their natural bounds by his reflex action upon them. 
Thus revelation is to be received on evidence, indeed, 
but an evidence conclusive only on a presupposition 
or series of presuppositions, evidence that is supple- 
mented by an act of imagination, or by the grace of 
faith, shall we say? At any rate, the fact is, that the 
genius of the great reasoner, of this great master of 
the abstract and deductive sciences, turned theologian, 
carrying the methods of thought there formed into the 
things of faith, was after all of the imaginative order. 
Now hear what he says of imagination : Cette faculte 
trompeuse, qui semhle no2is etre donnee expres pour nous 



72 PASCAL 

induire a une erreur necessaire. That has a sort of 
necessity in it. What he says has again the air of 
Montaigne, and he says much of the same kind : Ceite 
stiperbe puissance entieinie de la raiso?i, combien toutes 
les richesses de la terre sont instiffisajites sans son 
consentetnent. The imagination has the disposition 
of all things: Elle fait la beaiite, la justice, et le bon- 
heur, qui est le tout du monde. L' imagination dispose 
de tout. And what we have here to note is its ex- 
traordinary power in himself. Strong in him as the 
reasoning faculty, so to speak, it administered the 
reasoning faculty in him a son gre ; but he was unaware 
of it, that power d'autant plus fourbe qu'elle ne Vest 
pas toujours. Hidden under the apparent rigidity 
of his favourite studies, imagination, even in them, 
played a large part. Physics, mathematics were with 
him largely matters of intuition, anticipation, preco- 
cious discovery, short cuts, superb guessing. It was 
the inventive element in his work and his way of 
putting things that surprised those best able to judge. 
He might have discovered the mathematical sciences 
for himself, it is alleged, had his father, as he once 
had a mind to do, withheld him from instruction 
in them. 

About the time when he was bidding adieu to the 
world, Pascal had an accident. As he drove round a 
corner on the Seine side to cross the bridge at Neuilly, 
the horses were precipitated down the bank into the 
water. Pascal escaped, but with a nervous shock, a 
certain hallucination, from which he never recovered. 
As he walked or sat he was apt to perceive a yawning 



PASCAL 73 

depth beside him; would set stick or chair there to 
reassure himself. We are now told, indeed, that that 
circumstance has been greatly exaggerated. But how 
true to Pascal's temper, as revealed in his work, that 
alarmed precipitous character in it! Intellectually 
the abyss was evermore at his side. Nous avons, he 
observes, un autre principe d'erreur, les maladies. 
Now in him the imagination itself was like a physical 
malady, troubling, disturbing, or in active collusion 
with it. . . . 



ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY.* 

Titian, as we see him in what some have thought 
his noblest work, the large altar-piece, dated 1522, 
his forty-fifth year, of SS. Nazaro e Celso, at Brescia, 
is certainly a religious — a great, religious painter. 
The famous Gabriel of the Annunciation, aflight, in 
all the effortless energy of an angel indeed, and 
Sebastian, adapted, it was said, from an ancient 
statue, yet as novel in design as if Titian had been the 
first to handle that so familiar figure in old religious 
art — may represent for us a vast and varied amount 
of work — in which he expands to their utmost artistic 
compass the earlier religious dreams of Mantegna and 
the Bellini, affording sufficient proof how sacred 
themes could rouse his imagination, and all his 
manual skill, to heroic efforts. But he is also the 
painter of the Venus of the Trilmne and the Triumph 
of Bacchus ; and such frank acceptance of the volup- 
tuous paganism of the Renaissance, the motive of a 
large proportion of his work, might make us think 
that religion, grandly dramatic as was his conception 

1 Published in the New Review, Nov. 1890, and now reprinted 
by the kind permission of the proprietors. 

74 



ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 75 

of it, can have been for him only one of many pic- 
torial attitudes. There are however painters of that 
date who, while their work is great enough to be 
connected (perhaps groundlessly) with Titian's per- 
sonal influence, or directly attributed to his hand, 
possess at least this psychological interest, that about 
their religiousness there can be no question. Their 
work is to be looked for mainly in and about the two 
sub-alpine towns of Brescia and Bergamo; in the 
former of which it becomes definable as a school — 
the school of Moretto, in whom the perfected art of 
the later Renaissance is to be seen in union with a 
Catholicism as convinced, towards the middle of the 
sixteenth century, as that of Giotto or Angelico. 

Moretto of Brescia, for instance, is one of the few 
painters who have fully understood the artistic oppor- 
tunities of the subject of Saint Paul, for whom, for 
the most part, art has found only the conventional 
trappings of a Roman soldier (a soldier, as being in 
charge of those prisoners to Damascus), or a some- 
what common-place old age. Moretto also makes 
him a nobly accoutred soldier — the rim of the hel- 
met, thrown backward in his fall to the earth, rings 
the head already with a faint circle of glory — but a 
soldier still in possession of all those resources of 
unspoiled youth which he is ready to offer in a 
moment to the truth that has just dawned visibly upon 
him. The terrified horse, very grandly designed, 
leaps high against the suddenly darkened sky above 
the distant horizon of Damascus, with all Moretto' s 
peculiar understanding of the power of black and 



76 ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 

white. But what signs the picture inalienably as 
Moretto's own is the thought of the saint himself, at 
the moment of his recovery from the stroke of Heaven. 
The pure, pale, beardless face, in noble profile, might 
have had for its immediate model some military monk 
of a later age, yet it breathes all the joy and confi- 
dence of the Apostle who knows in a single flash of 
time that he has found the veritable captain of his 
soul. It is indeed the Paul whose genius of convic- 
tion has so greatly moved the minds of men — the 
soldier who, bringing his prisoners " bound to Damas- 
cus," is become the soldier of Jesus Christ. 

Moretto's picture has found its place (in a dark 
recess, alas !) in the Church of Santa Maria presso 
San Celso, in the suburbs of Milan, hard by the site 
of the old Roman cemetery, where Ambrose, at a 
moment when in one of his many conflicts a ''sign" 
was needed, found the bodies of Nazarus and Celsus, 
youthful patrician martyrs in the reign of Nero, over- 
flowing now with miraculous powers, their blood still 
fresh upon them — conspejsa recenti satiguine. The 
body of Saint Nazarus he removed into the city : that 
of Saint Celsus remained within the little sanctuary 
which still bears his name, and beside which, in the 
fifteenth century, arose the glorious Church of the 
Madonna, with spacious atrium after the Ambrosian 
manner, a fagade richly sculptured in the style of the 
Renaissance, and sumptuously adorned within. Be- 
hind the massive silver tabernacle of the altar of the 
miraculous picture which gave its origin to this 
splendid building, the rare visitor, peeping as into 



ART NOTES IX NORTH ITALY 77 

some sacred bird-nest, detects one of the loveliest 
works of Luini, a small, but exquisitely finished 
"Holy Family." Among the fine pictures around are 
works by two other very notable religious painters of 
the cinque-cento. Both alike, Ferrari and Borgognone, 
may seem to have introduced into fiery Italian lati- 
tudes a certain northern temperature, and somewhat 
twilight, French, or Flemish, or German, thoughts. 
Ferrari, coming from the neighbourhood of Varallo, 
after work at Vercelli and Novara, returns thither to 
labour, as both sculptor and painter, in the " stations " 
of the Sacro Monte, at a form of religious art which 
would seem to have some natural kinship with the 
temper of a mountain people. It is as if the living 
actors in the "Passion Play" of Oberammergau had 
been transformed into almost illusive groups in painted 
terra-cotta. The scenes of the Last Supper, of the 
Martyrdom of the Innocents, of the Raising of Jairus' 
daughter, for instance, are certainly touching in the 
naive piety of their life-sized realism. But Gaudenzio 
Ferrari had many helpmates at the Sacro Monte ; and 
his lovelier work is in the Franciscan Church at the 
foot of the hill, and in those two, truly Italian, far-off 
towns of the Lombard plain. Even in his great, 
many-storied fresco in the Franciscan Church at 
Varallo there are traces of a somewhat barbaric hank- 
ering after solid form; the armour of the Roman 
soldiers, for example, is raised and gilt. It is as if 
this serious soul, going back to his mountain home, 
had lapsed again into mountain "grotesque," with 
touches also, in truth, of a peculiarly northern poetry 



78 ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 

— a mystic poetry, which now and again, in his treat- 
ment, for instance, of angel forms and faces, reminds 
one of Blake. There is something of it certainly in 
the little white spectral soul of the penitent thief 
making its escape from the dishonoured body along 
the beam of his cross. 

The contrast is a vigorous one when, in the space 
of a few hours, the traveller finds himself at Vercelli, 
half-stifled in its thick pressing crop of pumpkins and 
mulberry trees. The expression of the prophet occurs 
to him: "A lodge in a garden of cucumbers." 
Garden of cucumbers and half-tropical flowers, it has 
invaded the quiet open spaces of the town. Search 
through them, through the almost cloistral streets, 
for the Church of the Umiliati; and there, amid the 
soft garden-shadows of the choir, you may find the 
sentiment of the neighbourhood expressed with great 
refinement in what is perhaps the masterpiece of 
Ferrari, " Our Lady of the Fruit-garden," as we might 
say — attended by twelve life-sized saints and the 
monkish donors of the picture. The remarkable 
proportions of the tall panel, up which the green- 
stuff is climbing thickly above the mitres and sacred 
garniture of those sacred personages, lend themselves 
harmoniously to the gigantic stature of Saint Christo- 
pher in the foreground as the patron saint of the 
church. With the savour of this picture in his 
memory, the visitor will look eagerly in some half- 
dozen neighbouring churches and deserted conventual 
places for certain other works from Ferrari's hand; 
and so, leaving the place under the influence of his 



ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 79 

delicate religious ideal, may seem to have been 
listening to much exquisite church-music there, vio- 
lins and the like, on that perfectly silent afternoon 
— such music as he may still really hear on Sundays 
at the neighbouring town of Novara, famed for it 
from of old. Here, again, the art of Gaudenzio 
Ferrari reigns. Gaudenzio! It is the name of the 
saintly prelate on whom his pencil was many times 
employed, First Bishop of Novara, and patron of the 
magnificent basilica hard by which still covers his 
body, whose earthly presence in cope and mitre 
Ferrari has commemorated in the altar-piece of the 
"Marriage of St. Catherine," with its refined richness 
of colour, like a bank of real flowers blooming there, 
and like nothing else around it in the vast duomo of 
old Roman architecture, now heavily masked in 
modern stucco. The solemn mountains, under the 
closer shadow of which his genius put on a northern 
hue, are far away, telling at Novara only as the 
grandly theatrical background to an entirely lowland 
life. And here, as at Vercelli so at Novara, Ferrari 
is not less graciously Italian than Luini himself. 

If the name of Luini's master, Borgognone, is no 
proof of northern extraction, a northern temper is 
nevertheless a marked element of his genius — some- 
thing of the patience, especially, of the masters of 
Dijon or Bruges, nowhere more clearly than in the 
two groups of male and female heads in the National 
Gallery, family groups, painted in the attitude of 
worship, with a lowly religious sincerity which may 
remind us of the contemporary work of M. Legros- 



80 ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 

Like those northern masters, he accepts piously, but 
can refine, what "has no comeliness." And yet per- 
haps no painter has so adequately presented that 
purely personal beauty (for which, indeed, even 
profane painters for the most part have seemed to 
care very little) as Borgognone in the two deacons, 
Stephen and Laurence, who, in one of the altar-pieces 
of the Certosa, assist at the throne of Syrus, ancient, 
sainted, First Bishop of Pavia — stately youths in 
quite imperial dalmatics of black and gold. An 
indefatigable worker at many forms of religious art, 
here and elsewhere, assisting at last in the carving 
and inlaying of the rich marble fagade of the Certosa, 
the rich carved and inlaid woodwork of Santa Maria 
at Bergamo, he is seen perhaps at his best, certainly 
in his most significantly religious mood, in the Church 
of the hicoronata at Lodi, especially in one picture 
there, the "Presentation of Christ in the Temple." 
The experienced visitor knows what to expect in the 
sacristies of the great Italian churches; the smaller, 
choicer works of Luini, say, of Delia Robbia or Mino 
of Fiesole, the superb ambries and drawers and 
presses of old oak or cedar, the still untouched morsel 
of fresco — like sacred priestly thoughts visibly lin- 
gering there in the half-light. Well ! the little 
octagonal Church of the Incoronata is like one of 
these sacristies. The work of Bramante — you see 
it, as it is so rarely one's luck to do, with its furniture 
and internal decoration complete and unchanged, 
the coloured pavement, the colouring which covers 
the walls, the elegant little organ of Domenico da 



ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY Si 

Lucca (1507), the altar-screens with their dainty rows 
of brass cherubs. In Borgognone's picture of the 
"Presentation," there the place is, essentially as we 
see it to-day. The ceremony, invested with all the 
sentiment of a Christian sacrament, takes place in this 
very church, this "Temple " of the Incoronata where 
you are standing, reflected on the dimly glorious wall, 
as in a mirror. Borgognone in his picture has but 
added in long legend, letter by letter, on the fascia 
below the cupola, the Song of Simeon. 

The Incoronata however is, after all, the monument 
less of Ambrogio Borgognone than of the gifted Piazza 
family : — Callisto, himself born at Lodi, his father, 
his uncle, his brothers, his son Fulvio, working there 
in three generations, under marked religious influ- 
ence, and with so much power and grace that, quite 
gratuitously, portions of their work have been attrib- 
uted to the master-hand of Titian, in some imaginary 
visit here to these painters, who were in truth the 
disciples of another — Romanino of Brescia. At 
Lodi, the lustre of Scipione Piazza is lost in that of 
Callisto, his elder brother; but he might worthily be 
included in a list of painters memorable for a single 
picture, such pictures as the solemn Madonna of 
Pierino del Vaga, in the Diiomo of Pisa, or the Holy 
Family of Pellegrino Piola, in the Goldsmiths' Street 
at Genoa. A single picture, a single figure in a 
picture, signed and dated, over the altar of Saint 
Clement, in the Church of San Spirito, at Bergamo, 
might preserve the fame of Scipione Piazza, who did 
not live to be old. The figure is that of the youthful 



82 ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 

Clement of Rome himself, " who had seen the blessed 
Apostles," writing at the dictation of Saint Paul. 
For a moment he looks away from the letters of the 
book with all the wistful intelligence of a boy softly 
touched already by the radiancy of the celestial Wis- 
dom. " Her ways are ways of pleasantness ! " That 
is the lesson this winsome, docile, spotless creature 
— ingeniii vultus puer ingenuique pudoris — younger 
brother or cousin of Borgognone's noble deacons at 
the Certosa — seems put there to teach us. And in 
this church, indeed, as it happens, Scipione's work 
is side by side with work of his. 

It is here, in fact, at Bergamo and at Brescia, that 
the late survival of a really convinced religious spirit 
becomes a striking fact in the history of Italian art. 
Vercelli and Novara, though famous for their moun- 
tain neighbourhood, enjoy but a distant and occasional 
view of Monte Rosa and its companions; and even 
then those awful stairways to tracts of airy sunlight 
may seem hardly real. But the beauty of the twin 
sub-alpine towns further eastward is shaped by the 
circumstance that mountain and plain meet almost 
in their streets, very effectively for all purposes of the 
picturesque. Brescia, immediately below the " Fal- 
con of Lombardy " (so they called its masterful 
fortress on the last ledge of the Pie di Monte), to 
which you may now ascend by gentle turfed paths, to 
watch the purple mystery of evening mount gradually 
from the great plain up the mountain-walls close at 
hand, is as level as a church pavement, home-like, 
with a kind of easy walking from point to point about 



ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 83 

it, rare in Italian towns — a town full of walled gar- 
dens, giving even to its smaller habitations the retire- 
ment of their more sumptuous neighbours, and a 
certain English air. You may peep into them, pacing 
its broad streets, from the blaze of which you are 
glad to escape into the dim and sometimes gloomy 
churches, the twilight sacristies, rich with carved and 
coloured woodwork. The art of Romanino still lights 
up one of the darkest of those churches with the 
altar-piece which is perhaps his most expressive and 
noblest work. The veritable blue sky itself seems 
to be breaking into the dark-cornered, low-vaulted, 
Gothic sanctuary of the Barefoot Brethren, around 
the Virgin and Child, the bowed, adoring figures 
of Bonaventura, Saint Francis, Saint Antony, the 
youthful majesty of Saint Louis, to keep for ever 
in memory — not the King of France however, in 
spite of the fleurs-de-lys on his cope of azure, but 
Louis, Bishop of Toulouse. A Rubens in Italy ! you 
may think, if you care to rove from the delightful 
fact before you after vague supposititious alliances 
— something between Titian and Rubens ! Certainly, 
Romanino's bold, contrasted colouring anticipates 
something of the northern freshness of Rubens. But 
while the peculiarity of the work of Rubens is a sense 
of momentary transition, as if the colours were even 
now melting in it, Romanino's canvas bears rather 
the steady glory of broad Italian noonday; while he 
is distinguished also for a remarkable clearness of 
design, which has perhaps something to do, is cer- 
tainly congruous with, a markedly religious sentiment. 



84 ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 

like that of Angelico or Perugino, lingering still in 
the soul of this Brescian painter towards the middle 
of the sixteenth century. 

Romanino and Moretto, the two great masters of 
Brescia in successive generations, both alike inspired 
above all else by the majesty, the majestic beauty, of 
religion — its persons, its events, every circumstance 
that belongs to it — are to be seen in friendly rivalry, 
though with ten years' difference of age between 
them, in the Church of San Giovanni Evangelista; 
Romanino approaching there, as near as he might, 
in a certain candle-lighted scene, to that harmony 
in black, white, and grey preferred by the younger 
painter. Before this or that example of Moretto's 
work, in that admirably composed picture of Saint 
Paul's Conversion, for instance, you might think of 
him as but a very noble designer in grisaille. A 
more detailed study would convince you that, what- 
ever its component elements, there is a very complex 
tone which almost exclusively belongs to him; the 
" Saint Ursula " finally, that he is a great, though very 
peculiar colourist — a lord of colour Avho, while he 
knows the colour resources that may lie even in black 
and white, has really included every delicate hue 
v/hatever in that faded "silver grey," which yet lin- 
gers in one's memory as their final effect. For some 
admirers indeed he is definable as a kind of really 
sanctified Titian. It must be admitted, however, 
that whereas Titian sometimes lost a little of himself 
in the greatness of his designs, or committed their 
execution, in part, to others, Moretto, in his work, 



ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 85 

is always all there — thorough, steady, even, in his 
workmanship. That, again, was a result of his late- 
surviving religious conscience. And here, as in other 
instances, the supposed influence of the greater master 
is only a supposition. As a matter of fact, at least 
in his earlier life, Moretto made no visit to Venice; 
developed his genius at home, under such conditions 
for development as were afforded by the example of 
the earlier masters of Brescia itself; left his work 
there abundantly, and almost there alone, as the 
thoroughly representative product of a charming 
place. In the little Church of San Clemente he is 
still "at home " to his lovers; an intimately religious 
artist, full of cheerfulness, of joy. Upon the airy 
galleries of his great altar-piece, the angels dance 
against the sky above the Mother and the Child; 
Saint Clement, patron of the church, being attendant 
in pontifical white, with Dominic, Catherine, the 
Magdalen, and good, big-faced Saint Florian in com- 
plete armour, benign and strong. He knows many a 
saint not in the Roman breviary. Was there a single 
sweet-sounding name without its martyr patron? 
Lucia, Agnes, Agatha, Barbara, Cecilia — holy women, 
dignified, high-bred, intelligent — have an altar of 
their own; and here, as in that festal high altar-piece, 
the spectator may note yet another artistic alliance, 
something of the pale effulgence of Correggio — an 
approach, at least, to that peculiar treatment of light 
and shade, and a pre-occupation with certain tricks 
therein of nature itself, by which Correggio touches 
Rembrandt on the one hand. Da Vinci on the other. 



86 ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 

Here, in Moretto's work, you may think that manner 
more delightful, perhaps because more refined, than 
in Correggio himself. Those pensive, tarnished, 
silver side-lights, like mere reflexions of natural sun- 
shine, may be noticed indeed in many another painter 
of that day, in Lanini, for instance, at the National 
Gallery. In his " Nativity " at the Brera, Procaccini 
of Verona almost anticipates Correggio' s Heilige 
Nacht It is, in truth, the first step in the decom- 
position of light, a touch of decadence, of sunset, 
along the whole horizon of North-Italian art. It is, 
however, as the painter of the white-stoled Ursula and 
her companions that the great master of Brescia is 
most likely to remain in the memory of the visitor; 
with this fact, above all, clearly impressed on it, that 
Moretto had attained full intelligence of all the 
pictorial powers of white. In the clearness, the 
cleanliness, the hieratic distinction, of this earnest 
and deeply-felt composition, there is something 
"pre-Raphaelite"; as also in a certain liturgical 
formality in the grouping of the virgins — the looks, 
"all one way," of the closely-ranged faces; while in 
the long folds of the drapery we may see something 
of the severe grace of early Tuscan sculpture — some- 
thing of severity in the long, thin, emphatic shadows. 
For the light is high, as with the level lights of early 
morning, the air of which rufifies the banners borne 
by Ursula in her two hands, her virgin companions 
laying their hands also upon the tall staves, as if tak- 
ing share, with a good will, in her self-dedication, 
with all the hazard of battle. They bring us, appro- 



ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY S7 

priately, close to the grave of this manly yet so 
virginal painter, born in the year 1500, dead at 
forty-seven. 

Of Moretto and Romanino, whose works thus light 
up, or refine, the dark churches of Brescia and its 
neighbourhood, Romanino is scarcely to be seen 
beyond it. The National Gallery, however, is rich 
in Moretto's work, with two of his rare poetic por- 
traits ; and if the large altar-picture would hardly tell 
his secret to one who had not studied him at Brescia, 
in those who already know him it will awake many a 
reminiscence of his art at its best. The three white 
mitres, for instance, grandly painted towards the centre 
of the picture, at the feet of Saint Bernardino of Siena 
— the three bishoprics refused by that lowly saint — 
may remind one of the great white mitre which, in the 
genial picture of Saint Nicholas, in the Miracoli at 
Brescia, one of the children, who as delightfully uncon- 
ventional acolytes accompany their beloved patron 
into the presence of the Madonna, carries along so 
willingly, laughing almost, with pleasure and pride, at 
his part in so great a function. In the altar-piece at 
the National Gallery those white mitres form the key- 
note from which the pale, cloistral splendours of the 
whole picture radiate. You see what a wealth of 
enjoyable colour Moretto, for one, can bring out of 
monkish habits in themselves sad enough, and receive 
a new lesson in the artistic value of reserve. 

Rarer still (the single work of Romanino, it is said, 
to be seen out of Italy) is the elaborate composition 
in five parts on the opposite side of the doorway. 



88 ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 

Painted for the high-altar of one of the many churches 
of Brescia, it seems to have passed into secular hands 
about a century ago. Alessandro, patron of the church, 
one of the many youthful patrician converts Italy 
reveres from the ranks of the Roman army, stands 
there on one side, with ample crimson banner superbly 
furled about his lustrous black armour, and on the 
other — Saint Jerome, Romanino's own namesake — 
neither more nor less than the familiar, self-tormenting 
anchorite ; for few painters (Bellini, to some degree, 
in his picture of the saint's study) have perceived the 
rare pictorial opportunities of Jerome ; Jerome with 
the true cradle of the Lord, first of Christian anti- 
quaries, author of the fragrant Vulgate version of the 
Scriptures. Alessandro and Jerome support the Mother 
and the Child in the central place. But the loveliest 
subjects of this fine group of compositions are in the 
corners above, half-length, life-sized figures — Gaudioso, 
Bishop of Brescia, above Saint Jerome ; above Ales- 
sandro, Saint Filippo Benizzi, meek founder of the 
Order of Servites to which that church at Brescia 
belonged, with his lily, and in the right hand a book ; 
and what a book ! It was another very different 
painter, Giuseppe Caletti, of Cremona, who, for the 
truth and beauty of his drawing of them, gained the 
title of the " Painter of Books." But if you wish to 
see what can be made of the leaves, the vellum cover, 
of a book, observe that in Saint Philip's hand. — The 
writer ? the contents ? you ask : What may they be ? 
and whence did it come? — out of embalmed sacristy, 
or antique coffin of some early Brescian martyr, or, 



ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 89 

through that bright space of blue Italian sky, from the 
hands of an angel, like his Annunciation lily, or the 
book received in the Apocalypse by John the Divine ? 
It is one of those old saints, Gaudioso (at home in 
every church in Brescia), who looks out with full face 
from the opposite corner of the altar-piece, from a 
background which, though it might be the new heaven 
over a new earth, is in truth only the proper, breath- 
able air of Italy. As we see him here, Saint Gaudioso 
is one of the more exquisite treasures of our National 
Gallery. It was thus that at the magic touch of 
Romanino's art the dim, early, hunted-down Brescian 
church of the primitive centuries, crushed into the 
dust, it might seem, was "brought to her king," out of 
those old dark crypts, "in raiment of needle- work" — 
the deUcate, richly folded, pontifical white vestments, 
the mitre and staff and gloves, and rich jewelled cope, 
blue or green. The face, of remarkable beauty after a 
type which all feel though it is actually rare in art, is 
probably a portrait of some distinguished churchman 
of Romanino's own day ; a second Gaudioso, perhaps, 
setting that later Brescian church to rights after the 
terrible French occupation in the painter's own time, 
as his saintly predecessor, the Gaudioso of the earlier 
century here commemorated, had done after the inva- 
sion of the Goths. The eloquent eyes are open upon 
some glorious vision. " He hath made us kings and 
priests ! " they seem to say for him, as the clean, sensi- 
tive lips might do so eloquently. Beauty and Holiness 
had "kissed each other," as in Borgognone's imperial 
deacons at the Certosa. At the Renaissance the 



90 ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY 

world might seem to have parted them again. But 
here certainly, once more, Catholicism and the Re- 
naissance, religion and culture, holiness and beauty, 
might seem reconciled, by one who had conceived 
neither after any feeble way, in a gifted person. Here 
at least, by the skill of Romanino's hand, the obscure 
martyr of the crypts shines as a saint of the later 
Renaissance, with a sanctity of which the elegant 
world itself would hardly escape the fascination, and 
which reminds one how the great Apostle Saint Paul 
has made courtesy part of the content of the Divine 
charity itself. A Rubens in Italy ! — so Romanino has 
been called. In this gracious presence we might think 
that, like Rubens also, he had been a courtier. 



\ 
I 



NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS^ 

The greatest and purest of Gothic churches, Notre- 
Dame d'Amiens, illustrates, by its fine qualities, a char- 
acteristic secular movement of the beginning of the 
thirteenth century. Philosophic writers of French his- 
tory have explained how, in that and in the two pre- 
ceding centuries, a great number of the more important 
towns in eastern and northern France rose against the 
feudal estabUshment, and developed severally the local 
and municipal life of the commune. To guarantee 
their independence therein they obtained charters from 
their formal superiors. The Charter of Amiens served 
as the model for many other communes. Notre-Dame 
d'Amiens is the church of a commune. In that cent- 
ury of Saint Francis, of Saint Louis, they were still 
religious. But over against monastic interests, as iden- 
tified with a central authority — king, emperor, or 
pope — they pushed forward the local, and, so to call 
it, secular authority of their bishops, the flower of the 
"secular clergy" in all its mundane astuteness, ready 
enough to make their way as the natural protectors of 

1 Published in the Nineteenth Century, March 1894, and now 
reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors. 

91 



92 NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS 

such townships- The people of Amiens, for instance, 
under a powerful episcopal patron, invested their civic 
pride in a vast cathedral, outrivalling neighbours, as 
being in effect their parochial church, and promoted 
there the new^ revolutionary, Gothic manner, at the 
expense of the derivative and traditional, Roman or 
Romanesque, style, the imperial style, of the great 
monastic churches. Nay, those grand and beautiful 
people's churches of the thirteenth century, churches 
pre-eminently of " Our Lady," concurred also v/ith 
certain novel humanistic movements of religion itself 
at that period, above all with the expansion of what is 
reassuring and popular in the worship of Mary, as a 
tender and accessible, though almost irresistible, inter- 
cessor with her severe and awful Son. 

Hence the splendour, the space, the novelty, of the 
great French cathedrals in the first Pointed style, 
monuments for the most part of the artistic genius of 
laymen, significant pre-eminently of that Queen of 
Gothic churches at Amiens. In most cases those 
early Pointed churches are entangled, here or there, 
by the constructions of the old round-arched style, the 
heavy, Norman or other, Romanesque chapel or aisle, 
side by side, though in strong contrast with, the soar- 
ing new Gothic of nave or transept. But of that older 
manner of the round arch, the plein-cintre, Amiens 
has nowhere, or almost nowhere, a trace. The Pointed 
style, fully pronounced, but in all the purity of its first 
period, found liere its completest expression. And 
while those venerable, Romanesque, profoundly char- 
acteristic, monastic churches, the gregarious product 



NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS 93 

of long centuries, are for the most part anonymous, as 
if to illustrate from the first a certain personal ten- 
dency which came in with the Gothic manner, we 
know the name of the architect under whom, in the 
year a.d. 1220, the building of the church of Amiens 
began — a layman, Robert de Luzarches. 

Light and space — floods of light, space for a vast 
congregation, for all the people of Amiens, for their 
movements, with something like the height and width 
of heaven itself enclosed above them to breathe in ; — 
you see at a glance that this is what the ingenuity 
of the Pointed method of building has here secured. 
For breadth, for the easy flow of a processional torrent, 
there is nothing like the " ambulatory," the aisle of 
the choir and transepts. And the entire area is on 
one level. There are here no flights of steps upward, 
as at Canterbury, no descending to dark crypts, as 
in so many Italian churches — a few low, broad steps 
to gain the choir, two or three to the high altar. To 
a large extent the old pavement remains, though 
almost worn-out by the footsteps of centuries. Price- 
less, though not composed of precious material, it 
gains its effect by ingenuity and variety in the pattern- 
ing, zigzags, chequers, mazes, prevailing respectively, in 
white and grey, in great square, alternate spaces — the 
original floor of a medieval church for once untouched. 
The massive square bases of the pillars of a Roman- 
esque church, harshly angular, obstruct, sometimes 
cruelly, the standing, the movements, of a multitude 
of persons. To carry such a multitude conveniently 
round them is the matter-of-fact motive of the gradual 



94 NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS 

chiselling away, the softening of the angles, the grace- 
ful compassing, of the Gothic base, till in our own 
Perpendicular period it all but disappears. You may 
study that tendency appropriately in the one church of 
Amiens ; for such in effect Notre-Dame has always 
been. That circumstance is illustrated by the great 
font, the oldest thing here, an oblong trough, perhaps 
an ancient saintly coffin, with four quaint prophetic 
figures at the angles, carved from a single block of 
stone. To it, as to the baptistery of an Italian town, 
not so long since all the babes of Amiens used to 
come for christening. 

Strange as it may seem, in this " queen " of Gothic 
churches, Veglise ogivale par excellence, there is nothing 
of mystery in the vision, which yet surprises, over and 
over again, the eye of the visitor who enters at the 
western doorway. From the flagstone at one's foot 
to the distant keystone of the chevet, noblest of its 
species — reminding you of how many largely graceful 
things, sails of a ship in the wind, and the hke ! — at 
one view the whole is visible, intelligible ; — the integ- 
rity of the first design ; how later additions affixed 
themselves thereto ; how the rich ornament gathered 
upon it ; the increasing richness of the choir ; its 
glazed triforium ; the realms of light which expand in 
the chapels beyond ; the astonishing boldness of the 
vault, the astonishing lightness of what keeps it above 
one ; the unity, yet the variety of perspective. There 
is no mystery here, and indeed no repose. Like the 
age which projected it, like the impulsive communal 
movement which was here its motive, the Pointed 



NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS 95 

style at Amiens is full of excitement. Go, for repose, 
to classic work, with the simple vertical law of pressure 
downwards, or to its Lombard, Rhenish, or Norman 
derivatives. Here, rather, you are conscious restlessly 
of that sustained equilibrium of obUque pressure on 
all sides, which is the essence of the hazardous Gothic 
construction, a construction of which the " flying 
buttress " is the most significant feature. Across the 
clear glass of the great windows of the triforium you 
see it, feel it, at its Atlas-work audaciously. '' A 
pleasant thing it is to behold the sun " those first 
Gothic builders would seem to have said to them- 
selves ; and at Amiens, for instance, the walls have 
disappeared ; the entire building is composed of its 
windows. Those who built it might have had for 
their one and only purpose to enclose as large a space 
as possible with the given material. 

No ; the peculiar Gothic buttress, with its double, 
triple, fourfold flights, while it makes such marvels 
possible, securing light and space and graceful effect, 
relieving the pillars within of their rnassiveness, is not 
a restful architectural feature. Consolidation of matter 
naturally on the move, security for settlement in a 
very complex system of construction — that is avow- 
edly a part of the Gothic situation, the Gothic prob- 
lem. With the genius which contended, though not 
always quite successfully, with this difficult problem, 
came also novel aesthetic effect, a whole volume of 
delightful aesthetic effects. For the mere melody of 
Greek architecture, for the sense as it were of music in 
the opposition of successive sounds, you got harmony , 



96 NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS 

the richer music generated by opposition of sounds in 
one and the same moment ; and were gainers. And 
then, in contrast with the classic manner, and the 
Romanesque survivals from it, the vast complexity of 
the Gothic style seemed, as if consciously, to corre- 
spond to the richness, the expressiveness, the thousand- 
fold influence of the Catholic religion, in the thirteent'h 
century still in natural movement in every direction. 
The later Gothic of the fifteenth and sixteenth cent- 
uries tended to conceal, as it now took for granted, 
the structural use of the buttress, for example ; seemed 
to turn it into a mere occasion for ornament, not 
always pleasantly : — while the ornament was out of 
place, the structure failed. Such falsity is far enough 
away from what at Amiens is really of the thirteenth 
century. In this pre-eminently " secular " church, 
the execution, in all the defiance of its method, is 
direct, frank, clearly apparent, with the result not 
only of reassuring the intelligence, but of keeping 
one's curiosity also continually on the alert, as we 
linger in these restless aisles. 

The integrity of the edifice, together with its volume 
of light, has indeed been diminished by the addition 
of a range of chapels, beyond the proper Hmits of the 
aisles, north and south. Not a part of the original 
design, these chapels were formed for private uses in 
the fourteenth century, by the device of walling in and 
vaulting the open spaces between the great buttresses 
of the nave. Under the broad but subdued sunshine 
which falls through range upon range of v/indows, 
reflected from white wall and roof and gallery, sooth- 



NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS 97 

ing to the eye, while it allows you to see the delicate 
carved work in all its refinement of touch, it is only as 
an after-thought, an artificial after-thought, that you 
regret the lost stained glass, or the vanished mural 
colour, if such to any large extent there ever were. 
The best stained glass is often that stained by weather, 
by centuries of weather, and we may well be grateful 
for the amazing cheerfulness of the interior of Amiens, 
as we actually find it. Windows of the richest remain, 
indeed, in the apsidal chapels ; and the rose-windows 
of the transepts are known, from the prevailing tones of 
their stained glass, as Fire and Water, the western rose 
symbolising in like manner Earth and Air, as respec- 
tively green and blue. But there is no reason to sup- 
pose that the interior was ever so darkened as to prevent 
one's seeing, really and clearly, the dainty ornament, 
which from the first abounded here ; the floriated 
architectural detail; the broad band of flowers and 
foliage, thick and deep and purely sculptured, above 
the arches of nave and choir and transepts, and wreath- 
ing itself continuously round the embedded piers which 
support the roof; with the woodwork, the illuminated 
metal, the magnificent tombs, the jewellers' work in 
the chapels. One precious, early thirteenth-century 
window oi grisaille remains, exquisite in itself, interest- 
ing as evidence of the sort of decoration which origi- 
nally filled the larger number of the windows. Grisaille, 
v/ith its lace-work of transparent grey, set here and 
there with a ruby, a sapphire, a gemmed medallion, 
interrupts the clear light on things hardly more than 
the plain glass, of which indeed such windows are 

H 



98 NOTRE-DAME D' AMIENS 

mainly composed. The finely designed frames of iron 
for the support of the glass, in the windows from which 
even this decoration is gone, still remain, to the de- 
light of those who are knowing in the matter. 

Very ancient light, this seems, at any rate, as if it 
had been lying imprisoned thus for long centuries ; 
were in fact the light over which the great vault 
originally closed, now become almost substance of 
thought, one might fancy, — a mental object or medium. 
We are reminded that after all we must of necessity 
look on the great churches of the Middle Age with 
other eyes than those who built or first worshipped in 
them ; that there is something verily worth having, 
and a just equivalent for something else lost, in the 
mere effect of time, and that the salt of all aesthetic 
study is in the question, — What, precisely what, is this 
to me? You and I, perhaps, should not care much 
for the mural colouring of a medieval church, could we 
see it as it was ; might think it crude, and in the way. 
What little remains of it at Amiens has parted, indeed, 
in the course of ages, with its shrillness and its coarse 
grain. And in this matter certainly, in view of Gothic 
polychrome, our difference from the people of the 
thirteenth century is radical. We have, as it was very 
unlikely they should have, a curiosity, a very pleasur- 
able curiosity, in the mere working of the stone they 
built with, and in the minute facts of their construc- 
tion, which their colouring, and the layer of plaster it 
involved, disguised or hid. We may think that in 
architecture stone is the most beautiful of all things. 
Modern hands have replaced the colour on some of 



NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS 99 

the tombs here — the effigies, the tabernacles above — 
skilfully as may be, and have but deprived them of 
their dignity. Medieval colouring, in fact, must have 
improved steadily, as it decayed, almost till there came 
to be no question of colour at all. In architecture, 
close as it is to men's hves and their history, the visible 
result of time is a large factor in the realised sesthetic 
value, and what a true architect will in due measure 
always trust to. A false restoration only frustrates the 
proper ripening of his work. 

If we may credit our modern eyes, then, those old, 
very secular builders aimed at, they achieved, an 
immense cheerfulness in their great church, with a 
purpose which still pursued them into their minuter 
decoration. The conventional vegetation of the 
Romanesque, its blendings of human or animal with 
vegetable form, in cornice or capital, have given way 
here, in the first Pointed style, to a pleasanter, because 
more natural, mode of fancy; to veritable forms of 
vegetable life, flower or leaf, from meadow and wood- 
side, though still indeed with a certain survival of the 
grotesque in a confusion of the leaf with the flower, 
which the subsequent Decorated period will wholly 
purge away in its perfect garden-borders. It was not 
with monastic artists and artisans that the sheds and 
workshops around Amiens Cathedral were filled, as it 
rose from its foundations through fifty years ; and 
those lay schools of art, with their communistic senti- 
ment, to which in the thirteenth century the great 
episcopal builders must needs resort, would in the 
natural course of things tend towards naturalism. The 



100 NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS 

subordinate arts also were no longer at the monastic 
stage, borrowing inspiration exclusively from the ex- 
periences of the cloister, but belonged to guilds of 
laymen — smiths, painters, sculptors. The great con- 
federation of the "city," the commune, subdivided 
itself into confederations of citizens. In the natural 
objects of the first Pointed style there is the freshness 
as of nature itself, seen and felt for the first time ; as if, 
in contrast, those older cloistral workmen had but fed 
their imagination in an embarrassed, imprisoned, and 
really decadent manner, or mere reminiscence of, or 
prescriptions about, things visible. 

Congruous again with the popularity of the builders 
of Amiens, of their motives, is the wealth, the freedom 
and abundance, of popular, almost secular, teaching, 
here afforded, in the carving especially, within and 
without ; an open Bible, in place of later legend, as 
at monastic Vezelay, — the Bible treated as a book 
about men and women, and other persons equally real, 
but blent with lessons, with the liveliest observations, 
on the lives of men as they were then and now, what 
they do, and how they do it, or did it then, and on the 
doings of nature which so greatly influence what man 
does ; together with certain impressive metaphysical 
and moral ideas, a sort of popular scholastic philos- 
ophy, or as if it were the virtues and vices Aristotle 
defines, or the characters of Theophrastus, translated 
into stone. Above all, it is to be observed that as 
a result of this spirit, this " free " spirit, in it, art has at 
last become personal. The artist, as such, appears at 
Amiens, as elsewhere, in the thirteenth century ; and. 



NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS 101 

by making his personal way of conception and execu- 
tion prevail there, renders his own work vivid and 
organic, and apt to catch the interest of other people. 
He is no longer a Byzantine, but a Greek — an uncon- 
scious Greek. Proof of this is in the famous Beau-Dieu 
of Amiens, as they call that benign, almost classically 
proportioned figure, on the central pillar of the great 
west doorway ; though in fact neither that, nor any- 
thing else on the west front of Amiens, is quite the best 
work here. For that we must look rather to the 
sculpture of the portal of the south transept, called, 
from a certain image there, Portail de la Vierge doree, 
gilded at the expense of some unknown devout person 
at the beginning of the last century. A presentation 
of the mystic, the delicately miraculous, story of Saint 
Honor^, eighth Bishop of Amiens, and his companions, 
with its voices, its intuitions, and celestial intimations, 
it has evoked a correspondent method of work at 
once 7idive and nicely expressive. The rose, or roue, 
above it, carries on the outer rim seventeen per- 
sonages, ascending and descending — another piece 
of popular philosophy — the wheel of fortune, or of 
human life. 

And they were great brass-founders, surely, who at 
that early day modelled and cast the tombs of the Bish- 
ops Evrard and Geoffrey, vast plates of massive black 
bronze in half-relief, like abstract thoughts of those 
grand old prelatic persons. The tomb of Evrard, who 
laid the foundations {qui fundamenta hujus basilicce 
locavit), is not quite as it was. Formerly it was sunk 
in the pavement, while the tomb of Bishop Geoffrey 



102 NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS 

opposite (it was he closed in the mighty vault of the 
nave: hanc basilicam culmen usque perduxii), itself 
vaulted-over the space of the grave beneath. The 
supreme excellence of those original workmen, the 
journeymen of Robert de Luzarches and his successor, 
would seem indeed to have inspired others, who have 
been at their best here, down to the days of Louis the 
Fourteenth. It prompted, we may think, a high level 
of execution, through many revolutions of taste in such 
matters ; in the man^ellous furniture of the choir, for 
instance, like a whole wood, say a thicket of old haw- 
thorn, with its curved topmost branches spared, slowly 
transformed by the labour of a whole family of artists, 
during fourteen years, into the stalls, in number one 
hundred and ten, with nearly four thousand figures. 
Yet they are but on a level with the Flamboyant 
carved and coloured enclosures of the choir, with the 
histories of John the Baptist, whose face-bones are 
here preserv^ed, and of Saint Firmin — popular saint, 
who protects the houses of Amiens from fire. Even 
the screens of forged iron around the sanctuary, work 
of the seventeenth century, appear actually to soar, in 
their way, in concert with the airy Gothic structure ; to 
let the daylight pass as it will; to have come, they too, 
from smiths, odd as it may seem at just that time, with 
some touch of inspiration in them. In the beginning of 
the fifteenth century they had reared against a certain 
bald space of wall, between the great portal and the 
western "rose," an organ, a lofty, many-chambered, 
veritable house of church-music, rich in azure and 
gold, finished above at a later day, not incongruously, 



NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS 103 

in the quaint, pretty manner of Henri-Deux. And 
those who are interested in the curiosities of ritual, 
of the old provincial Gallican "uses," will be surprised 
to find one where they might least have expected it. 
The reserved Eucharist still hangs suspended in a pyx, 
formed like a dove, in the midst of that lamentable 
"glory " of the eighteenth century in the central bay of 
the sanctuary, all the poor, gaudy, gilt rays converg- 
ing towards it. There are days in the year in which 
the great church is still literally filled with reverent 
worshippers, and if you come late to service you 
push the doors in vain against the closely serried 
shoulders of the good people of Amiens, one and 
all in black for church-holiday attire. Then, one and 
all, they intone the Tantum ergo (did it ever sound 
so in the Middle Ages?) as the Eucharist, after 
a long procession, rises once more into its resting- 
place. 

If the Greeks, as at least one of them says, really 
beUeved there could be no true beauty without bigness, 
that thought certainly is most specious in regard to 
architecture ; and the thirteenth-century church of 
Amiens is one of the three or four largest buildings in 
the world, out of all proportion to any Greek building, 
both in that and in the multitude of its external sculpt- 
ure. The chapels of the nave are embellished with- 
out by a double range of single figures, or groups, 
commemorative of the persons, the mysteries, to which 
they are respectively dedicated — the gigantic form 
of Christopher, the Mystery of the Annunciation. 

The builders of the church seem to have projected 



104 NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS 

no very noticeable towers; though it is conventional 
to regret their absence, especially with visitors from 
England, where indeed cathedral and other towers are 
apt to be good, and really make their mark. Robert 
de Luzarches and his successors aimed rather at the 
domical outline, with its central point at the centre of 
the church, in the spire ox flcche. The existing spire 
is a wonderful mass of carpentry of the beginning of 
the sixteenth century, at which time the lead that 
carefully wraps every part of it was heavily gilt. The 
great western towers are lost in the west front, the 
grandest, perhaps the earliest, example of its species — 
three profound, sculptured portals ; a double gallery 
above, the upper gallery carrying colossal images of 
twenty-two kings of the House of Judah, ancestors of 
Our Lady ; then the great rose ; above it the ringers' 
gallery, half masking the gable of the nave, and uniting 
at their topmost storeys the twin, but not exactly 
equal or similar, towers, oddly oblong in plan, as if 
never intended to carry pyramids or spires. They 
overlook an immense distance in those flat, peat-dig- 
ging, black and green regions, with rather cheerless 
rivers, and are the centre of an architectural region 
wider still — of a group to which Soissons, far beyond 
the woods of Compiegne, belongs, with St. Quentin, 
and, towards the west, a too ambitious rival, Beauvais, 
which has stood however — what we now see of it — 
for six centuries. 

It is a spare, rather sad world at most times that 
Notre-Dame d'Amiens thus broods over; a country 
with httle else to be proud of; the sort of world, in 



NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS 105 

fact, which makes the range of conceptions embodied 
in these cUffs of quarried and carved stone all the 
more welcome as a hopeful complement to the meagre- 
ness of most people's present existence, and its appar- 
ent ending in a sparely built coffin under the flinty- 
soil, and grey, driving sea-winds. In Notre-Dame, 
therefore, and her sisters, there is not only a common 
method of construction, a single definable type, differ- 
ent from that of other French latitudes, but a corre- 
spondent common sentiment also ; something which 
speaks, amid an immense achievement just here of 
what is beautiful and great, of the necessity of an 
immense effort in the natural course of things, of 
what you may see quaintly designed in one of those 
hieroglyphic carvings — radix de terra siiienti : " a 
root out of a dry ground." 



VEZELAY/ 

As you discern the long unbroken line of its roof, 
low-pitched for France, above the cottages and willow- 
shaded streams of the place, you might think the abbey 
church of Pontigny, the largest Cistercian church now 
remaining, only a great farm- building. On a nearer 
view there is something unpretending, something 
pleasantly English, in the plain grey walls, pierced 
with long " lancet" windows, as if they overlooked the 
lowlands of Essex, or the meadows of Kent or Berk- 
shire, the sort of country from which came those 
saintly exiles of our race who made the cloisters of 
Pontigny famous, and one of whom, Saint Edmund of 
Abingdon, Saint-Edme, still lies enshrined here. The 
country which the sons of Saint Bernard choose for 
their abode is in fact but a patch of scanty pasture- 
land in the midst of a heady wine-district. Like its 
majestic Cluniac rivals, the church has its western 
portico, elegant in structure but of comparatively 
humble proportions, under a plain roof of tiles, pent- 
wise. Within, a heavy coat of white-wash seems befit- 

1 Published in the Nineteenth Century, June 1894, and now 
reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors. 
io5 



VEZELAY 107 

ting to the simple forms of the " Transition," or quite 
earliest " Pointed/' style, to its remarkable continence 
of spirit, its uniformity, and cleanness of build. The 
long prospect of nave and choir ends, however, with 
a sort of graceful smallness, in a chevet of seven closely 
packed, narrow bays. It is like a nun's church, or like 
a nun's coif. 

The church of Pontigny, representative generally of 
the churches of the Cistercian order, including some of 
the loveliest early EngHsh ones, was in truth significant 
of a reaction, a reaction against monasticism itself, as 
it had come to be in the order of Cluny, the genius of 
which found its proper expression in the imperious, but 
half- barbaric, splendours of the richest form of the 
Rojjianesque, the monastic style pre-eminently, as we 
may still see it at La Charit^-sur-Loire, at Saint- 
Benoit, above all, on the hill of V^zelay. Saint 
Bernard, who had lent his immense influence to the 
order of Citeaux by way of a monastic reform, though 
he had a genius for hymns and was in other ways an 
eminent religious poet, and though he gave new life 
to the expiring romance of the crusades, was, as regards 
the visible world, much of a Puritan. Was it he who, 
wrapt in thought upon the world unseen, walked along 
the shores of Lake Leman without observing it? — the 
eternal snows he might have taken for the walls of the 
New Jerusalem ; the blue waves he might have fancied 
its pavement of sapphire. In the churches, the wor- 
ship, of his new order he required simplicity, and even 
severity, being fortunate in finding so winsome an 
exponent of that principle as the early Gothic of 



108 VEZELAY 

Pontigny, or of the first Cistercian church, now 
destroyed, at Citeaux itself. Strangely enough, while 
Bernard's own temper of mind was a survival from the 
past (we see this in his contest with Abelard), hier- 
archic, reactionary, suspicious of novelty, the archi- 
tectural style of his preference was largely of secular 
origin. It had a large share in that inventive and 
innovating genius, that expansion of the natural human 
soul, to which the art, the literature, the religious 
movements of the thirteenth century in France, as in 
Italy, where it ends with Dante, bear witness. 

In particular, Bernard had protested against the 
sculpture, rich and fantastic, but gloomy, it might be 
indecent, developed more abundantly than anywhere 
else in the churches of Burgundy, and especially in 
those of the Cluniac order. " What is the use," he 
asks, " of those grotesque monsters in painting and 
sculpture ? " and almost certainly he had in mind the 
marvellous carved work at V^zelay, whither doubtless 
he came often — for example on Good Friday, 1 146, to 
preach, as we know, the second crusade in the presence 
of Louis the Seventh. He too might have wept at the 
sight of the doomed multitude (one in ten, it is said, 
returned from the Holy Land), as its enthusiasm, 
under the charm of his fiery eloquence, rose to the 
height of his purpose. Even the aisles of V^zelay 
were not sufficient for the multitude of his hearers, and 
he preached to them in the open air, from a rock still 
pointed out on the hillside. Armies indeed have been 
encamped many times on the slopes and meadows 
of the valley of the Cure, now to all seeming so 



V-EZELAY 109 

impregnably tranquil. The .Cluniac order even then 
had already declined from its first intention ; and that 
decline became especially visible in the Abbey of 
V^zelay itself not long after Bernard's day. Its 
majestic immoveable church was complete by the 
middle of the twelfth century. And there it still 
stands in spite of many a threat, while the conventual 
buildings around it have disappeared ; and the institu- 
tion it represented — secularised at its own request at 
the Reformation — had dwindled almost to nothing at 
all, till in the last century the last Abbot built him- 
self, in place of the old Gothic lodging below those 
solemn walls, a sort of Chateau Gaillard, a dainty 
abode in the manner of Louis Quinze — swept away 
that too at the Revolution — where the great oaks 
now flourish, with the rooks and squirrels. 

Yet the order of Cluny, in its time, in that dark 
period of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, had 
deserved well of those to whom religion, and art, and 
social order are precious. The Cluniacs had in fact 
represented monasticism in the most legitimate form 
of its activity ; and, if the church of V^zelay was not 
quite the grandest of their churches, it is certainly 
the grandest of them which remains. It is also 
typical in character. As Notre-Dame d'Amiens is 
pre-eminently the church of the city, of a commune, 
so the Madeleine of Vezelay is typically the church 
of a monastery. 

The monastic style proper, then, in its peculiar power 
and influence, was Romanesque, and with the Cluniac 
order ; and here perhaps better than anywhere else we 



110 VEZELAY 

may understand what it really came to, what was its 
effect on the spirits, the imagination. 

As at Pontigny, the Cistercians, for the most part, 
built their churches in lowly valleys, according to the 
intention of their founder. The representative church 
of the Cluniacs, on the other hand, hes amid the closely 
piled houses of the little town, which it protected and 
could punish, on a steep hill-top, like a long massive 
chest there, heavy above you, as you cUmb slowly the 
winding road, the old unchanged pathway of Saint 
Bernard. In days gone by it threatened the surround- 
ing neighbourhood with four boldly built towers ; had 
then also a spire at the crossing ; and must have been 
at that time like a more magnificent version of the 
buildings which still crown the hill of Laon. Exter- 
nally, the proportions, the squareness, of the nave 
(west and east, the vast narthex or porch, and the 
Gothic choir, rise above its roof-line), remind one of 
another great Romanesque church at home — of the 
nave of Winchester, out of which Wykeham carved his 
richly panelled Perpendicular interior. 

At Vezelay however, the Romanesque, the Roman- 
esque of Burgundy, alike in the first conception of the 
whole structure, and in the actual locking together of 
its big stones, its masses of almost unbroken masonry, 
its inertia, figures as of more imperial character, and 
nearer to the Romans of old, than its feebler kindred in 
England or Normandy. We seem to have before us 
here a Romanesque architecture, studied, not from 
Roman basilicas or Roman temples, but from the 
arenas, the colossal gateways, the triumphal arches, of 



VEZELAY 111 

the people of empire, such as remain even now, not in 
the South of France only. The simple " flying," or 
rather leaning and almost couchant, buttresses, quad- 
rants of a circle, might be parts of a Roman aqueduct. 
In contrast to the lightsome Gothic manner of the last 
quarter of the twelfth century (as we shall presently find 
it here too, like an escape for the eye, for the temper, 
out of some grim under-world into genial daylight) , the 
Cluniac church might seem a still active instrument of 
the iron tyranny of Rome, of its tyranny over the animal 
spirits. As the ghost of ancient Rome still lingers 
" over the grave thereof," in the papacy, the hierarchy, 
so is it with the material structures also, the Cluniac and 
other Romanesque churches, which most emphatically 
express the hierarchical, the papal system. There is 
something about this church of Vezelay, in the long- 
sustained patience of which it tells, that brings to mind 
the labour of slaves, whose occasional Fescennine 
licence and fresh memories of a barbaric life also find 
expression, now and again, in the strange sculpture of 
the place. Yet here for once, around a great French 
church, there is the kindly repose of English "pre- 
cincts," and the country which this monastic acropolis 
overlooks southwards is a very pleasant one, as we 
emerge from the shadows of — yes ! of that peculiarly 
sad place — a country all the pleasanter by reason of 
the toil upon it, performed, or exacted from others, by 
the monks, through long centuries ; Le Aloi-van, with 
its distant blue hills and broken foreground, the vine- 
yards, the patches of woodland, the roads winding into 
their cool shadows ; though in truth the fortress-like 



112 VEZELA^ 

outline of the monastic church and the sombre hue of 
its material lend themselves most readily to the effects 
of a stormy sky. 

By a door, which in the great days opened from 
a magnificent cloister, you enter what might seem 
itself but the ambulatory of a cloister, superbly vaulted 
and long and regular, and built of huge stones of a 
metallic colour. It is the southern aisle of the nave, 
a nave of ten bays, the grandest Romanesque interior 
in France, perhaps in the world. In its mortified light 
the very soul of monasticism, Roman and half-military, 
as the completest outcome of a religion of threats, 
seems to descend upon one. Monasticism is indeed 
the product of many various tendencies of the religious 
soul, one or another of which may very properly con- 
nect itself with the Pointed style, as we saw in those 
lightsome aisles of Pontigny, so expressive of the 
purity, the lowly sweetness, of the soul of Bernard. 
But it is here at Vezelay, in this iron place, that 
monasticism in its central, its historically most signifi- 
cant purpose, presents itself as most completely at 
home. There is no triforium. The monotonous 
cloistral length of wall above the long-drawn series 
of stately round arches, is unbroken save by a plain 
small window in each bay, placed as high as possible 
just below the cornice, as a mere after-thought, you 
might fancy. Those windows were probably unglazed, 
and closed only with wooden shutters as occasion 
required. Furnished with the stained glass of the 
period, they would have left the place almost in dark- 
ness, giving doubtless full effect to the monkish can- 



> VEZELAY 113 

die-light in any case needful here. An almost perfect 
cradle-roof, tunnel-like from end to end of the long 
central aisle, adds by its simplicity of form to the 
magnificent unity of effect. The bearing-arches, which 
span it from bay to bay, being parti-coloured, with 
voussures of alternate white and a kind of grey or 
green, being also somewhat flat at the keystone, and 
literally eccentric, have, at least for English eyes, 
something of a Saracenic or other Oriental character. 
Again, it is as if the architects — the engineers — who 
worked here, had seen things undreamt of by other 
Romanesque builders, the builders in England and 
Normandy. 

Here then, scarcely reheving the almost savage 
character of the work, abundant on tympanum and 
doorway without, above all on the immense capitals 
of the nave within, is the sculpture which offended 
Bernard. A sumptuous band of it, a carved guipure 
of singular boldness, passes continuously round the 
arches, and along the cornices from bay to bay, 
and with the large bossy tendency of the ornament 
throughout may be regarded as typical of Burgun- 
dian richness. Of sculptured capitals, to like, or to 
dislike with Saint Bernard, there are nearly a hundred, 
unwearied in variety, unique in the energy of their 
conception, full of wild promise in their coarse 
execution, cruel, you might say, in the realisation 
of human form' and features. Irresistibly they rivet 
attention. 

The subjects are for the most part Scriptural, chosen 
apparently as being apt for strongly satiric treatment. 



114 VEZELAY 

the suicide of Judas, the fall of Goliath. The legend 
of Saint Benedict, naturally at home in a Benedictine 
church, presented the sculptor with a series of forcible 
grotesques ready-made. Some monkish story, half 
moral, half facetious, perhaps a little coarse, like that 
of Sainte Eugenie, from time to time makes variety ; 
or an example of the punishment of the wicked by 
men or by devils, who play a large, and to themselves 
thoroughly enjoyable and merry, part here. The 
sculptor would seem to have witnessed the punishment 
of the blasphemer; how adroitly the executioner 
planted knee on the culprit's bosom, as he lay on the 
ground, and out came the sinful tongue, to meet the 
iron pincers. The minds of those who worked thus 
seem to have been almost insanely preoccupied just 
then with the human countenance, but by no means 
exclusively in its pleasantness or dignity. Bold, crude, 
original, their work indicates delight in the power of 
reproducing fact, curiosity in it, but little or no sense 
of beauty. The humanity therefore here presented, as 
in the Cluniac sculpture generally, is wholly unconven- 
tional. M. Viollet-le-Duc thinks he can trace in it 
individual types still actually existing in the peasantry 
of Le Morvan. Man and morahty, however, disap- 
pearing at intervals, the acanthine capitals have a kind 
of later Venetian beauty about them, as the Venetian 
birds also, the conventional peacocks, or birds wholly 
of fantasy, amid the long fantastic foliage. There are 
still however no true flowers of the field here. There 
is pity, it must be confessed, on the other hand, and the 
delicacy, the beauty, which that always brings with it, 



VEZELAY 115 

where Jephtha peeps at the dead daughter's face, lift- 
ing timidly the great leaves that cover it ; in the hang- 
ing body of Absalom ; in the child carried away by 
the eagle, his long frock twisted in the wind as he 
goes. The parents run out in dismay, and the devil 
grins, not because it is the punishment of the child 
or of them ; but because he is the author of all mis- 
chief everywhere, as the monkish carver conceived — 
so far wholesomely. 

We must remember that any sculpture less em- 
phatic would have been ineffective, because practically 
invisible, in this sombre place. But at the west end 
there is an escape for the eye, for the soul, towards 
the unhindered, natural, afternoon sun; not however 
into the outer and open air, but through an arcade of 
three bold round arches, high above the great closed 
western doors, into a somewhat broader and loftier 
place than this, a reservoir of light, a veritable camera 
lucida. The light is that which lies below the vault 
and within the tribunes of the famous narthex (as 
they say), the vast fore-church or vestibule, into which 
the nave is prolonged. A remarkable feature of many 
Cluniac churches, the great western porch, on a scale 
which is approached in England only at Peterborough, 
is found also in some of the churches of the Cister- 
cians. It is characteristic, in fact, rather of Burgundy 
than of either of those religious orders especially. At 
Pontigny itself, for instance, there is a good one ; 
and a very early one at Paray-le-Monial. Saint-P^re- 
sous-V^zelay, daughter of the great church, in the 
vale below, has a late Gothic example ; Semur also, 



116 VEZELAY 

with fantastic lodges above it. The cathedral of 
Autun, a secular church in rivalry of the "religious," 
presents, by way of such western porch or vestibule, 
two entire bays of the nave, unglazed, with the vast 
western arch open to the air ; the west front, with its 
rich portals, being thrown back into the depths of the 
great fore-church thus produced. 

The narthex of V^zelay, the largest of these singular 
structures, is glazed, and closed towards the west by 
what is now the fagade. It is itself in fact a great 
church, a nave of three magnificent bays, and of three 
aisles, with a spacious triforium. With their fantastic 
sculpture, sheltered thus from accident and weather, 
in all its original freshness, the great portals of the 
primitive _/afrt!^/(? serve now for doorways, as a second, 
solemn, door of entrance, to the church proper within. 
The very structure of the place, and its relation to the 
main edifice, indicate that it was for use on occasion, 
when, at certain great feasts, that of the Magdalen 
especially, to whom the church of V^zelay is dedicated, 
the monastery was swollen with pilgrims, too poor, 
too numerous, to be lodged in the town, come hither 
to worship before the relics of the friend of Jesus, 
enshrined in a low-vaulted crypt, the floor of which is 
the natural rocky surface of the hill-top. It may be 
that the pilgrims were permitted to lie for the night, 
not only on the pavement, but (if so favoured) in the 
high and dry chamber formed by the spacious triforium 
over the north aisle, awaiting an early Mass. The 
primitive west front, then, had become but a wall of 
partition ; and above its central portal, where the 



VEZELAY 117 

round arched west windows had been, ran now a kind 
of broad, arcaded tribune, in full view of the entire 
length of the church. In the midst of it stood an 
altar; and here perhaps, the priest who officiated 
being visible to the whole assembled multitude east 
and west, the early Mass was said. 

The great vestibule was finished about forty years 
after the completion of the nave, towards the middle 
of the twelfth century. And here, in the great pier- 
arches, and in the eastern bay of the vault, still with 
the large masonry, the large, fiat, unmoulded surfaces, 
and amid the fantastic carvings of the Romanesque 
building about it, the Pointed style, determined yet 
discreet, makes itself felt — makes itself felt by appear- 
ing, if not for the first time, yet for the first time in 
the organic or systematic development of French archi- 
tecture. Not in the unambitious/^^^^/.? of Saint-Denis, 
nor in the austere aisles of Sens, but at V^zelay, in 
this grandiose fabric, so worthy of the event, Viollet-le- 
Duc would fain see the birthplace of the Pointed style. 
Here at last, with no sense of contrast, but by way 
of veritable " transition," and as if by its own matured 
strength, the round arch breaks into the double curve, 
ks arcs brises, with a wonderful access of grace. And 
the imaginative effect is forthwith enlarged. Beyond, 
far beyond, what is actually presented to the eye in 
that peculiar curvature, its mysterious grace, and by the 
statelihess, the elevation of the ogival method of vault- 
ing, the imagination is stirred to present one with 
what belongs properly to it alone. The masonry, 
though large, is nicely fitted ; a large light is admitted 



118 VEZELAY 

through the now fully pronounced Gothic windows 
towards the west. At Amiens we found the Gothic 
spirit, reigning there exclusively, to be a restless one. 
At V^zelay, where it breathes for the first time amid 
the heavy masses of the old imperial style, it breathes 
the very genius of monastic repose. And then, whereas 
at Amiens, and still more at Beauvais, at Saint-Quen- 
tin, you wonder how these monuments of the past can 
have endured so long, in strictly monastic V^zelay you 
have a sense of freshness, such as, in spite of their 
ruin, we perceive in the buildings of Greece. We 
enjoy here not so much, as at Amiens, the sentiment 
of antiquity, but that of eternal duration. 

But let me place you once more where we stood for 
a while, on entering by the doorway in the midst of 
the long southern aisle. Cross the aisle, and gather 
now in one view the perspective of the whole. Away 
on the left hand the eye is drawn upward to the tran- 
quil light of the vaults of the fore-church, seeming 
doubtless the more spacious because partly concealed 
from us by the wall of partition below. But on 
the right hand, towards the east, as if with the set 
purpose of a striking architectural contrast, an instruc- 
tion as to the place of this or that manner in the archi- 
tectural series, the long, tunnel-like, military work of 
the Romanesque nave opens wide into the exhilarating 
daylight of choir and transepts, in the sort of Gothic 
Bernard would have welcomed, with a vault rising 
now high above the roof-line of the body of the church, 
sicui lilium excelsum. The simple flowers, the flora, 
of the early Pointed style, which could never have 



VEZELAY 119 

looked at home as an element in the half-savage 
decoration of the nave, seem to be growing here upon 
the sheaves of slender, reedy pillars, as if naturally 
in the carved stone. Even here indeed, Roman, or 
Romanesque, taste still lingers proudly in the monolith 
columns of the chevet. Externally, we may note with 
what dexterity the Gothic choir has been inserted into 
its place, below and within the great buttresses of the 
earlier Romanesque one. 

Visitors to the great church of Assisi have sometimes 
found a kind of parable in the threefold ascent from 
the dark crypt where the body of Saint Francis lies, 
through the gloomy " lower " church, into the height 
and breadth, the physical and symbolic "illumination," 
of the church above. At V^zelay that kind of con- 
trast suggests itself in one view; the hopeful, but 
transitory, glory upon which one enters ; the long, 
darksome, central avenue ; the " open vision " into 
which it conducts us. As a symbol of resurrection, 
its choir is a fitting diadem to the church of the 
Magdalen, whose remains the monks meant it to 
cover. 

And yet, after all, notwithstanding this assertion of 
the superiority (are we so to call it ?) of the new Gothic 
way, perhaps by the very force of contrast, the Made- 
leine of V^zelay is still pre-eminently a Romanesque, 
and thereby the typically monastic, church. In spite 
of restoration even, as we linger here, the impression of 
the monastic Middle Age, of a very exclusive monas- 
ticism, that has verily turned its back upon common 
life, jealously closed inward upon itself, is a singularly 



120 VEZELAY 

weighty one ; the more so because, as the peasant said 
when asked the way to an old sanctuary that had fallen 
to the occupation of farm-labourers, and was now 
deserted even by them : Maintenant il ti'y a per' 
Sonne la. 



APOLLO IN PICARDY,^ 

" Consecutive upon Apollo in all his solar fer/our 
and effulgence," says a writer of Teutonic proclivities, 
" we may discern even among the Greeks themselves, 
elusively, as would be natural with such a being, almost 
like a mock sun amid the mists, the northern or ultra- 
northern sun-god. In hints and fragments the lexicog- 
raphers and others have told us something of this 
Hyperborean Apollo, fancies about him which evidence 
some knowledge of the Land of the Midnight Sun, of 
the sun's ways among the Laplanders, of a hoary 
summer breathing very softly on the violet beds, or 
say, the London-pride and crab-apples, provided for 
those meagre people, somewhere amid the remoteness 
of their icy seas. In such wise Apollo had already 
anticipated his sad fortunes in the Middle Age as a god 
definitely in exile, driven north of the Alps, and even 
here ever in flight before the summer. Summer 
indeed he leaves now to the management of others, 
finding his way from France and Germany to still 
paler countries, yet making or taking with him always 

1 Published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Nov. 1893, and 
now reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors. 

121 



122 APOLLO IN PICARDY 

a certain seductive summer-in-winter, though also with 
a divine or titanic regret, a titanic revolt in his heart, 
and consequent inversion at times of his old beneficent 
and properly solar doings. For his favours, his falla- 
cious good-humour, which has in truth a touch of malign 
magic about it, he makes men pay sometimes a terrible 
price, and is in fact a devil ! " 

Devilry, devil's work : — traces of such you might 
fancy were to be found in a certain manuscript volume 
taken from an old monastic library in France at the 
Revolution. It presented a strange example of a cold 
and very reasonable spirit disturbed suddenly, thrown 
off its balance, as by a violent beam, a blaze of new 
light, revealing, as it glanced here and there, a hundred 
truths unguessed as before, yet a curse, as it turned out, 
to its receiver, in dividing hopelessly against itself the 
well-ordered kingdom of his thought. Twelfth volume 
of a dry enough treatise on mathematics, applied, still 
with no relaxation of strict method, to astronomy and 
music, it should have concluded that work, and there- 
with the second period of the life of its author, by 
drawing tight together the threads of a long and 
intricate argument. In effect however, it began, or, in 
perturbed manner, and as with throes of childbirth, 
seemed the preparation for, an argument of an entirely 
new and disparate species, such as would demand a new 
period of life also, if it might be, for its due expansion. 

But with what confusion, what baffling inequalities ! 
How afflicting to the mind's eye ! It was a veritable 
" solar storm " — this illumination, which had burst at 



APOLLO IN PICARDY 123 

the last moment upon the strenuous, self-possessed, 
much-honoured monastic student, as he sat down peace- 
fully to write the last formal chapters of his work ere 
he betook himself to its well-earned practical reward 
as superior, with lordship and mitre and ring, of 
the abbey whose music and calendar his mathemati- 
cal knowledge had qualified him to reform. The very 
shape of Volume Twelve, pieced together of quite 
irregularly formed pages, was a solecism. It could 
never be bound. In truth, the man himself, and v/hat 
passed with him in one particular space of time, had 
invaded a matter, which is nothing if not entirely 
abstract and impersonal. Indirectly the volume was 
the record of an episode, an interlude, an interpolated 
page of life. And whereas in the earlier volumes you 
found by way of illustration no more than the simplest 
indispensable diagrams, the scribe's hand had strayed 
here into mazy borders, long spaces of hieroglyph, and 
as it were veritable pictures of the theoretic elements of 
his subject. Soft wintry auroras seemed to play behind 
whole pages of crabbed textual writing, line and figure 
bending, breathing, flaming, into lovely " arrange- 
ments " that were like music made visible ; till writing 
and writer changed suddenly, " to one thing constant 
never," after the known manner of madmen in such 
work. Finally, the whole matter broke off with an 
unfinished word, as a later hand testified, adding the 
date of the author's death, " deliquio animi.^'' 

He had been brought to the monastery as a little 
child ; was bred there ; had never yet left it, busy 
and satisfied through youth and early manhood ; was 



124 APOLLO IN PICARDY 

grown almost as necessary a part of the community as 
the stones of its material abode, as a pillar of the great 
tower he ascended to watch the movement of the stars. 
The structure of a fortified medieval town barred in 
those who belonged to it very effectively. High 
monastic walls intrenched the monk still further. 
From the summit of the tower you looked straight 
down into the deep narrow streets, upon the houses 
(in one of which Prior Saint-Jean was born) climbing 
as high as they dared for breathing-space within that 
narrow compass. But you saw also the green breadth 
of Normandy and Picardy, this way and that ; felt on 
your face the free air of a still wider realm beyond 
what was seen. The reviving scent of it, the mere 
sight of the flowers brought thence, of the country prod- 
uce at the convent gate, stirred the ordinary monkish 
soul with desires, sometimes with efforts, to be sent 
on duty there. Prior Saint-Jean, on the other hand, 
shuddered at the view, at the thoughts it suggested to 
him ; thoughts of unhallowed wild places, where the old 
heathen had worshipped " stocks and stones," and where 
their wickedness might still survive them in something 
worse than mischievous tricks of nature, such as you 
might read of in Ovid, whose verses, however, he for 
his part had never so much as touched with a finger. 
He gave thanks rather, that his vocation to the abstract 
sciences had kept him far apart from the whole crew 
of miscreant poets — Abode of demons. 

Thither nevertheless he was now to depart, sent to 
the Grange or Obedience of Notre-Dame De-Pratis by 
the aged Abbot (about to resign in his favour) for the 



APOLLO IN PICARDY 125 

benefit of his body's health, a little impaired at last by 
long intellectual effort, yet so invaluable to the com- 
munity. But let him beware ! whispered his dearest 
friend, who shared those strange misgivings, let him 
"take heed to his ways" when he was come to that 
place. " The mere contact of one's feet with its soil 
might change one." And that same night, disturbed 
perhaps by thoughts of the coming journey with which 
his brain was full, Prior Saint-Jean himself dreamed 
vividly, as he had been little used to do. He saw the 
very place in which he lay (he knew it ! his little inner 
cell, the brown doors, the white breadth of wall, the black 
crucifix upon it) alight, alight softly ; and looking, as he 
fancied, from the window, saw also a low circlet of sound- 
less flame, waving, licking daintily up the black sky, 
but harmless, beautiful, closing in upon that round dark 
space in the midst, which was the earth. He seemed 
to feel upon his shoulder just then the touch of his 
friend beside him. "It is hell-fire ! " he said. 

The Prior took with him a very youthful though 
devoted companion — Hyacinthus, the pet of the com- 
munity. They laughed admiringly at the rebellious 
masses of his black hair, with blue in the depths of it, 
like the wings of the swallow, which refused to conform 
to the monkish pattern. It only grew twofold, crov/n 
upon crown, after the half-yearly shaving. And he was 
as neat and serviceable as he was delightful to be with. 
Prior Saint-Jean, then, and the boy started before 
daybreak for the long journey; onwards, till dark- 
ness, a soft twilight rather, was around them again. 
How unlike a winter night it seemed, the further they 



J26 APOLLO IN PICARDY 

went through the endless, lonely, turf-grown tracts, and 
along the edge of a valley, at length — vallis mona- 
chorum, monksvale — taken aback by its sudden steep- 
ness and depth, as of an immense oval cup sunken in 
the grassy upland, over which a golden moon now 
shone broadly. Ah ! there it was at last, the white 
Grange, the white gable of the chapel apart amid a 
few scattered white gravestones, the white flocks 
crouched about on the hoar-frost, like the white 
clouds, packed somewhat heavily on the horizon, 
and nacres as the clouds of June, with their own 
light and heat in them, in their hollows, you might 
fancy. 

From the very first, the atmosphere, the light, the 
influence of things, seemed different from what they 
knew ; and how distant already the dark buildings of 
their home ! Was there the breath of surviving sum- 
mer blossom on the air? Now and then came a 
gentle, comfortable bleating from the folds, and them- 
selves slept soundly at last in the great open upper 
chamber of the Grange ; were awakened by the 
sound of thunder. Strange, in the late November 
night ! It had parted, however, with its torrid fierce- 
ness ; modulated by distance, seemed to break away 
into musical notes. And the lightning lingered along 
with it, but glancing softly; was in truth an aurora, 
such as persisted month after month on the northern 
sky as they sojourned here. Like Prospero's en- 
chanted island, the whole place was "full of noises." 
The wind it might have been, passing over metallic 
strings, but that they were audible even when the 
night was breathless. 



APOLLO IN PICARDY 127 

So like veritable music, however, were they on that 
first night that, upon reflexion, the Prior climbed 
softly the winding stair down which they appeared 
to flow, to the great solar among the beams of the 
roof, where the farm produce lay stored. A flood of 
moonUght now fell through the unshuttered dormer- 
windows ; and, under the glow of a lamp hanging from 
the low rafters, Prior Saint-Jean seemed to be looking 
for the first time on the human form, on the old Adam 
fresh from his Maker's hand. A servant of the house, 
or farm-labourer, perhaps ! — fallen asleep there by 
chance on the fleeces heaped like golden stufl" high in 
all the corners of the place. A serf ! But what un- 
serflike ease, how lordly, or godlike rather, in the 
posture ! Could one fancy a single curve bettered in 
the rich, warm, white limbs ; in the haughty features of 
the face, with the golden hair, tied in a mystic knot, 
fallen down across the inspired brow? And yet what 
gentle sweetness also in the natural movement of the 
bosom, the throat, the lips, of the sleeper ! Could that 
be diabolical, and really spotted with unseen evil, which 
was so spotless to the eye? The rude sandals of the 
monastic serf lay beside him apart, and all around was 
of the roughest, excepting only two strange objects 
lying within reach (even in their own renowned 
treasury Prior Saint-Jean had not seen the like of 
them), a harp, or some such instrument, of silver-gilt 
once, but the gold had mostly passed from it, and 
a bow, fashioned somehow of the same precious sub- 
stance. The very form of these things filled his mind 
with inexplicable misgivings. He repeated a befitting 
collect, and trod softly away. 



128 APOLLO IN PICARDY 

It was in truth but a rude place to which they were 
come. But, after life in the monastery, the severe dis- 
cipline of which the Prior himself had done much to 
restore, there was luxury in the free, self-chosen hours, 
the irregular fare, in doing pretty much as one pleased, 
in the sweet novelties of the country ; to the boy Hya- 
cinth especially, who forgot himself, or rather found his 
true self for the first time. Girding up his heavy frock, 
which he laid aside erelong altogether to go in his 
coarse linen smock only, he seemed a monastic novice 
no longer ; yet, in his natural gladness, was found more 
companionable than ever by his senior, surprised, 
delighted, for his part, at the fresh springing of his 
brain, the spring of his footsteps over the close green- 
sward, as if smoothed by the art of man. Cause of his 
renewed health, or concurrent with its effects, the air 
here might have been that of a veritable paradise, still 
unspoiled. ''Could there be unnatural magic," he 
asked himself again, ''any secret evil, lurking in these 
tranquil vale-sides, in their sweet low pastures, in the 
belt of scattered woodland above them, in the rills of 
pure water which hsped from the open down beyond ? " 
Making what was really a boy's experience, he had 
a wholly boyish delight in his holiday, and certainly 
did not reflect how much we beget for ourselves in 
what we see and feel, nor how far a certain diffused 
music in the very breath of the place was the creation 
of his own ear or brain. 

That strange enigmatic owner of the harp and the 
bow, whom he had found sleeping so divinely, actually 
waited on them the next morning with all obsequious- 



APOLLO IN PICARDY 129 

ness, stirred the great fire of peat, adjusted duly their 
monkish attire, laid their meal. It seemed an odd 
thing to be served thus, like St. Jerome by the lion, 
as if by some imperiously beautiful wild animal tamed. 
You hesitated to permit, were a little afraid of, his ser- 
vices. Their silent tonsured porter himself, contrast 
grim enough to any creature of that kind, had been so 
far seduced as to permit him to sleep there in the 
Grange, as he loved to do, instead of in ruder, rougher 
quarters ; and, coaxed into odd garrulity on this one 
matter, told the new-comers the Httle he knew, with 
much also that he only suspected, about him ; among 
other things, as to the origin of those precious objects, 
which might have belonged to some sanctuary or noble 
house, found thus in the possession of a mere labourer, 
who is no Frenchman, but a pagan, or gipsy, white as 
he looks, from far south or east, and who works or 
plays furtively, by night for the most part, returning to 
sleep awhile before daybreak. The other herdsmen of 
the valley are bond-servants, but he a hireling at will, 
though coming regularly at a certain season. He has 
come thus for any number of years past, though seem- 
ingly never grown older (as the speaker reflects), 
singing his way meagrely from farm to farm, to the 
sound of his harp. His name? — It was scarcely a 
name at all, in the diffident syllables he uttered in 
answer to that question, on first coming there ; but of 
names known to them it came nearest to a malignant 
one in Scripture, ApoUyon. ApoUyon had a just 
discernible tonsure, but probably no right to it. 

Well skilled in architecture, Prior Saint-Jean was set, 

K 



130 APOLLO IN PICARDY 

by way of a holiday task, to superintend the comple- 
tion of the great monastic barn then in building. The 
visitor admires it still ; perhaps supposes it, with its 
noble aisle, though set north and south, to be a dese- 
crated church. If he be an expert in such matters, he 
will remark a sort of classical harmony in its broad, 
very simple proportions, with a certain suppression of 
Gothic emphasis, more especially in that peculiarly 
Gothic feature, the buttresses, scarcely marking the 
unbroken, windowless walls, which rise very straight, 
taking the sun placidly. The silver-grey stone, cut, if 
it came from this neighbourhood at all, from some now 
forgotten quarry, has the fine, close-grained texture of 
antique marble. The great northern gable is almost 
a classic pediment. The horizontal Unes of plinth and 
ridge and cornice are kept unbroken, the roof of sea- 
grey slates being pitched less angularly than is usual 
in this rainy clime. A welcome contrast, the Prior 
thought it, to the sort of architectural nightmare he 
came from. He found the structure already more 
than half-way up, the low squat pillars ready for their 
capitals. 

Yes ! it must have so happened often in the Middle 
Age, as you feel convinced, in looking sometimes at 
medieval building. Style must have changed under 
the very hands of men who were no wilful innovators. 
Thus it was here, in the later work of Prior Saint-Jean, 
all unconsciously. The mysterious harper sat there 
always, at the topmost point achieved ; played, idly 
enough it might seem, on his precious instrument, but 
kept in fact the hard taxed workmen literally in tune, 



APOLLO IN PICARDY 131 

working for once with a ready will, and, so to speak, 
with really inventive hands — working expeditiously, in 
this favourable weather, till far into the night, as they 
joined unbidden in a chorus, which hushed, or rather 
turned to music, the noise of their chipping. It was 
hardly noise at all, even in the night-time. Now and 
again Brother ApoUyon descended nimbly to surprise 
them, at an opportune moment, by the display of an 
immense strength. A great cheer exploded suddenly, 
as single-handed he heaved a massive stone into its 
place. He seemed to have no sense of weight : — 
"Put there by the devil ! " the modern villager assures 
you. 

With a change then, not so much of style as of 
temper, of management, in the application of acknowl- 
edged rules, Prior Saint-Jean shaping only, adapting, 
simpUfying, partly with a view to economy, not the 
heavy stones only, but the heavy manner of using them, 
turned light. With no pronounced ornamentation, it 
is as if in the upper story ponderous root and stem 
blossomed gracefully, blossomed in cornice and capital 
and pliant arch-line, as vigorous as they were grace- 
ful, and rose on high quickly. Almost suddenly tie-beam. 
and rafter knit themselves together into the stone, and 
the dark, dry, roomy place was closed in securely to 
this day. Mere audible music, certainly, had counted 
for something in the operations of an art, held at its 
best (as we know) to be a sort of music made visible. 
That idle singer, one might fancy, by an art beyond 
art, had attracted beams and stones into their fit 
places. And there, sure enough, he still sits, as a 



132 APOLLO IN PICARDY 

final decorative touch, by way of apex on the gable 
which looks northward, though much weather-worn, 
and with an ugly gap between the shoulder and the 
fingers on the harp,* as if, literally, he had cut off his 
right hand and put it from him : — King David, or an 
angel? guesses the careless tourist. The space below 
has been lettered. After a little puzzling you recognise 
there the relics of a familiar verse from a Latin psalm : 
Nisi Dominus cedificaverit domum, and the rest : in- 
scribed as well as may be in Greek characters. Prior 
Saint-Jean caused it to be so inscribed, absurdly, 
during his last days there. 

And is not the human body, too, a building, with 
architectural laws, a structure, tending by the very 
forces which primarily held it together to drop asunder 
in time? Not in vain, it seemed, had Prior Saint-Jean 
come to this mystic place for the improvement of his 
body's health. Thenceforth that fleshly tabernacle 
had housed him, had housed his cunning, overwrought 
and excitable soul, ever the better day by day, and he 
began to feel his bodily health to be a positive quality 
or force, the presence near him of that singular being 
having surely something to do with this result. He 
and his fascinations, his music, himself, might at least 
be taken for an embodiment of all those genial in- 
fluences of earth and sky, and the easy ways of living 
here, which made him turn, with less of an effort than 
he had known for many years past, to his daily tasks, 
and sink so regularly, so immediately, to wholesome 
rest on returning from them. It was as if Brother 

1 Or sundial, as some maintain, though turned from the south. 



APOLLO IN PICARDY 133 

ApoUyon himself abhorred the spectacle of distress, 
and mainly for his own satisfaction charmed away 
other people's maladies. The mere touch of that ice- 
cold hand, laid on the feverish brow, when the Prior 
lapsed from time to time into his former troubles, 
certainly calmed the respiration of a troubled sleeper. 
Was there magic in it, not wholly natural? The hand 
might have been a dead one. But then, was it sur- 
prising, after all, that the methods of curing men's 
maladies, as being in very deed the fruit of sin, should 
have something strange and unlooked-for about them, 
like some of those Old Testament healings and purifica- 
tions which the Prior's biblical lore suggested to him ? 
Yet Brother Apollyon, if their surly Janitor, in his less 
kindly moments, spoke truly, himself greatly needed 
purification, being not only a thief, but a homicide in 
hiding from the law. Nay, once, on his annual return 
from southern or eastern lands, he had been observed 
on his way along the streets of the great town literally 
scattering the seeds of disease till his serpent-skin bag 
was empty. And within seven days the " black death " 
was there, reaping its thousands. As a wise man 
declared, he who can best cure disease can also most 
cunningly engender it. 

In short, these creatures of rule, these " regulars," 
the Prior and his companion, were come in contact for 
the first time in their lives with the power of untutored 
natural impulse, of natural inspiration. The boy ex- 
perienced it immediately in the games which suited 
his years, but which he had never so much as seen 
before ; as his superior was to undergo its influence 



134 APOLLO IN PICARDY 

by-and-by in serious study. By night chiefly, in its 
long, continuous twiUghts, Hyacinth became really 
a boy at last, with immense gaiety; eyes, hands 
and feet awake, expanding, as he raced his comrade 
over the turf, with the conical Druidic stone for a 
goal, or wrestled lithely enough with him, though as 
with a rock ; or, taking the silver bow in hand for 
a moment, transfixed a mark, next a bird, on the 
bough, on the wing, shedding blood for the first time, 
with a boy's delight, a boy's remorse. Friend Apol- 
lyon seemed able to draw the wild animals too, to 
share their sport, yet not altogether kindly. Tired, 
surfeited, he destroys them when his game with them 
is at an end ; breaks the toy ; deftly snaps asunder the 
fragile back. Though all ahke would come at his call, 
or the sound of his harp, he had his preferences ; and 
warred in the night-time, as if on principle, against the 
creatures of the day. The small furry thing he pierced 
with his arrow fled to him nevertheless caressingly, 
with broken limb, to die palpitating in his hand. In 
this wonderful season, the migratory birds, from Nor- 
way, from Britain beyond the seas, came there as usual 
on the north wind, with sudden tumult of wings ; but 
went that year no further, and by Christmas-time had 
built their nests, filling that belt of woodland around the 
vale with the chatter of their business and love quarrels. 
In turn they drew after them strangers no one here 
had ever known before ; the like of which Hyacinth, 
who knew his bestiary, had never seen even in a 
picture. The wild-cat, the wild-swan — the boy peeped 
on these wonders as they floated over the vale, or 



APOLLO IN PICARDY 135 

glided with unwonted confidence over its turf, under 
the moonhght, or that frequent continuous aurora which 
was not the dawn. Even the modest rivulets of the 
hill-side felt that influence, and " lisped " no longer, but 
babbled as they leapt, like mountain streams, exposing 
their rocky bed. Were they angry, as they ran red 
sometimes with blood-drops from the stricken bird 
caught there by rock or bough, as it fell with rent 
breast among the waves ? 

But say, think, what you might against him, the 
pagan outlaw was worth his hire as a herdsman ; 
seemingly loved his sheep ; was an " affectionate 
shepherd " ; cured their diseases ; brought them easily 
to the birth, and if they strayed afar would bring them 
back tenderly upon his shoulders. Monastic persons 
would have seen that image many times before. 
Yet if Apollyon looked like the great carved figure 
over the low doorway of their place of penitence 
at home, that could be but an accident, or perhaps a 
deceit ; so closely akin to those soulless creatures did 
he still seem to the wondering Prior, — immersed in, or 
actually a part of, that irredeemable natural world he 
had dreaded so greatly ere he came hither. And was 
he after all making terms with it now, in the seductive 
person of this mysterious being — man or demon — sus- 
pected of murder ; who has an air of unfathomable evil 
about him as from a distant but ineffaceable past, and 
a sort of heathen understanding with the dark realm of 
matter ; who is bringing the simple people, the women 
and lovesick lads, back to those caves and cromlechs 
and blasted trees, resorts of old godless secret- telling? 



136 APOLLO IN PICARDY 

And still he has all his own way with beasts and man, 
with the Prior himself, much as all alike distrust him. 
Most conspicuous in the little group of buildings, 
a feudal tower of goodly white stone, cylindrical and 
smoothly poHshed without to hinder the ascent of 
creeping things, and snugly plastered within to resist 
the damp, was the pigeon-house — a veritable feudal 
tower, a veritable feudal plaisa?tce of birds, which the 
common people dared not so much as ruffle. About 
a thousand of them were housed there, each in its little 
chamber, encouraged to grow plump, and to breed, in 
perfect self-content. From perch to perch of the great 
axle-tree in the centre, monastic feet might climb, 
gentle monastic hands pass round to every tiny com- 
partment in turn. The arms of the monastery were 
carved on the keystone of the doorway, and the tower 
finished in a conical roof, with becoming aerial gail- 
lardise, with pretty dormer-windows for the inmates 
to pass in and out, little balconies for brooding in the 
sun, little awnings to protect them from rough breezes, 
and a great weather-vane, on which the birds crowded 
for the chance of a ride. If the peasants of that day, 
whose small fields they plundered, noting all this, per- 
haps envied the birds dumbly, for the brethren, on the 
other hand, it was a constant delight to watch the 
feathered brotherhood, which supplied likewise their 
daintiest fare. Who then, what hawk, or wild-cat, or 
other savage beast, had ravaged it so wantonly, so very 
cruelly destroyed the bright creatures in a single night 
— broken backs, rent away limbs, pierced the wings ? 
And what was that object there below? The silver 



APOLLO IN PICARDY 137 

harp surely, lying broken likewise on the sanded floor, 
soaking in the pale milky blood and torn plumage. 

ApoUyon sobbed and wept audibly as he went about 
his ordinary doings next day, for once fully, though 
very sadly, awake in it; and towards evening, when 
the villagers came to the Prior to confess themselves, 
the Feast of the Nativity being now at hand, he too 
came along with them in his place meekly, like any 
other penitent, touched the lustral water devoutly, 
knew all the ways, seemed to desire absolution from 
some guilt of blood heavier than the slaughter of beast 
or bird. The Prior and his attendant, on their side, 
are reminded that by this time they have wellnigh for- 
gotten the monastic duties still incumbent upon them, 
especially in that matter of the " Offices." On the 
vigil of the feast, however, Brother ApoUyon himself 
summoned the devout to Midnight Mass with the great 
bell, which had hung silent for a generation, wedged 
in immoveably by a beam of the cradle fallen out of its 
place. With an immense efibrt of strength he relieved 
it, hitched the bell back upon its wheel ; the thick rust 
cracked on the hinges, and the strokes tolled forth 
betimes, with a hundred querulous, quaint creatures, 
bats and owls, circling stupidly in the waves of sound, 
but allowed to settle back again undisturbedly into 
their beds. 

People and priest, the Prior, vested as well as 
might be, with Hyacinth as "server," come in due 
course, all alike amazed to find that frozen neglected 
place, with its low-browed vault and narrow win- 
dows, alight, and as if warmed with flowers from 



138 APOLLO IN PICARDY 

a summer more radiant far than that of France, Avith 
ilex and laurel — gilt laurel — by way of holly and box. 
Prior Saint-Jean felt that he had never really seen 
flowers before. Somewhat later they and the like of 
them seemed to have grown into and over his brain ; 
to have degraded the scientific and abstract outlines of 
things into a tangle of useless ornament. Whence 
were they procured? From what height, or hellish 
depth perhaps? ApoUyon, who entered the chapel 
just then, as if quite naturally, though with a bleating 
lamb in his bosom {" dropped " thus early in that won- 
derful season) by way of an offering, took his place at 
the altar's very foot, and drawing forth his harp, now 
restrung, at the right moment, turned to real silvery 
music the hoarse Gloria in Excelsis of those rude wor- 
shippers, still shrinking from him, while they listened in 
a little circle, as he stood there in his outlandish attire 
of skins strangely spotted and striped. With that how- 
ever the Mass broke off unconsummated. The Prior 
felt obliged to desist from the sacred office, and had 
left the altar hurriedly. 

But Brother ApoUyon put his strange attire aside 
next day, and in a much-worn monk's frock, drawn forth 
from a dark corner, came with them, still like a peni- 
tent, when they turned once more to their neglected 
studies somewhat sadly. See them then, after a 
collect for " Light " repeated by Hyacinth, skull-cap 
in hand, seated at their desks in the little scyiptorium, 
panelled off from their living-room on the first floor, 
while the Prior makes an effort to recover the last 
thought of his long-suspended work, in the execution 



APOLLO IN PICARDY 139 

of which the boy is to assist with his skilful pen. The 
great glazed mndows remain open ; admit, as if 
already on the soft air of spring, what seems like a 
stream of flowery odours, the entire moonlit scene, 
with the thorn bushes on the vale-side prematurely 
bursting into blossom, and the sound of birds and 
flocks emphasising the deep silence of the night. 

ApoUyon then, as if by habit, as he had shared all 
their occupations of late, had taken his seat beside 
them, meekly enough, at first with the manner of a 
mere suppliant for the crumbs of their high studies. 
But, straightway again, he surprises by more than rac- 
ing forward incredibly on the road to facts, and from 
facts to luminous doctrine ; Prior Saint-Jean himself, 
in comparison, seeming to lag incompetently behind. 
He can but wonder at this strange scholar's knowledge 
of a distant past, evidenced in his familiarity (it was 
as if he might once have spoken them) with the dead 
languages in which their text-books are written. 
There was more surely than the utmost merely natural 
acuteness in his guesses as to the words intended by 
those crabbed contractions, of their meaning, in his 
sense of allusions and the like. An ineffaceable mem- 
ory it might rather seem of the entire world of which 
those languages had been the living speech, once more 
vividly awake under the Prior's cross-questioning, and 
now more than supplementing his own laborious search. 

And at last something of the same kind happens 
with himself. Had he, on his way hither from the 
convent, passed unwittingly through some river or 
rivulet of Lethe, that had carried away from him all 



140 APOLLO IN PICARDY 

his so carefully accumulated intellectual baggage of 
fact and theory? The hard and abstract laws, or 
theory of the laws, of music, of the stars, of mechani- 
cal structure, in hard and abstract /^r;/7?//i^, adding to 
the abstract austerity of the man, seemed to have 
deserted him ; to be revived in him again however, at 
the contact of this extraordinary pupil or fellow-in- 
quirer, though in a very different guise or attitude 
towards himself, as matters no longer to be reasoned 
upon and understood, but to be seen rather, to be 
looked at and heard. Did not he see the angle of the 
earth's axis with the ecliptic, the deflexions of the 
stars from their proper orbits with fatal results here 
below, and the earth — wicked, unscriptural truth ! — 
moving round the sun, and those flashes of the eternal 
and unorbed light such as bring water, flowers, living 
things, out of the rocks, the dust ? The singing of the 
planets : he could hear it, and might in time effect its 
notation. Having seen and heard, he might erelong 
speak also, truly and with authority, on such matters. 
Could one but arrest it for one's self, for final trans- 
ference to others, on the written or printed page — 
this beam of insight, or of inspiration ! 

Alas ! one result of its coming was that it encouraged 
delay. If he set hand to the page, the firm halo, here 
a moment since, was gone, had flitted capriciously to 
the wall ; passed next through the window, to the wall 
of the garden ; was dancing back in another moment 
upon the innermost walls of one's own miserable 
brain, to swell there — that astounding white light ! — 
rising steadily in the cup, the mental receptacle, till 



APOLLO IN PICARDY 141 

it overflowed, and he lay faint and drowning in it. 
Or he rose above it, as above a great liquid surface, 
and hung giddily over it — light, simple, and absolute 
— ere he fell. Or there was a battle between light 
and darkness around him, with no way of escape from 
the baffling strokes, the lightning flashes ; flashes of 
blindness one might rather call them. In truth, the 
intuitions of the night (for they worked still, or tried 
to work, by night) became the sickly nightmares of 
the day, in which Prior Saint-Jean slept, or tried to 
sleep, or lay sometimes in a trance without food for 
many hours, from which he would spring up suddenly 
to crowd, against time, as much as he could into his 
book with pen or brush ; winged flowers, or stars with 
human limbs and faces, still intruding themselves, or 
mere notes of light and darkness from the actual hori- 
zon. There it all is still in the faded gold and colours 
of the ancient volume — " Prior Saint-Jean's folly : " — 
till on a sudden the hand collapses, as he becomes 
aware of that real, prosaic, broad daylight lying harsh 
upon the page, making his delicately toned auroras 
seem but a patch of grey, and himself for a moment, 
with a sigh of disgust, of self-reproach, to be his old 
unimpassioned monastic self once more. 

The boy, for his part, was grown at last full of mis- 
giving. He ponders how he may get the Prior away, 
or escape by himself, find his way back to the convent 
and report his master's condition, his strange loss of 
memory for names and the like, his illusions about 
himself and others. And he is more than ever dis- 
trustful now of his late beloved playmate, who quietly 



142 APOLLO IN PICARDY 

obstructs any movement of the kind, and has under- 
taken, at the Prior's entreaty, to draw down the moon 
from the sky, for some shameful price, known to the 
magicians of that day. 

Yet Apollyon, at all events, would still play as gaily 
as ever on occasion. Hitherto they had played as 
young animals do ; without playthings namely, apply- 
ing hand or foot only to their games. But it happened 
about this time that a grave was dug, a grave of 
unusual depth, to be ready, in that fiery plaguesome 
weather, the first heat of veritable summer come sud- 
denly, for the body of an ancient villager then at the 
point of death. In the drowsy afternoon Hyacinth 
awakes Apollyon, to see the strange thing he has 
found at the grave-side, among the gravel and yellow 
bones cast up there. He had wrested it with difficulty 
from the hands of the half-crippled gravedigger, at 
eighty still excitable by the mere touch of metal. 

The like of it had indeed been found before, within 
living memory, in this place of immemorial use as 
a graveyard — " Devil's penny-pieces " people called 
them. Five such lay hidden already in a dark 
corner of the chapel, to keep them from superstitious 
employment. To-day they came out of hiding at last. 
Apollyon knew the use of the thing at a glance ; had 
put an expert hand to it forthwith; poises the discus; 
sets it wheeling. How easily it spins round under 
one's arm, in the groove of the bent fingers, slips 
thence smoothly like a knife flung from its sheath, as 
if for a course of perpetual motion ! Splendescit 
eundo : it seems to burn as it goes. It is heavier many 



APOLLO IN PICARDY 143 

times than it looks, and sharp-edged. By night they 
have scoured and pohshed the corroded surfaces. 
Apollyon promises Hyacinth and himself rare sport 
in the cool of the evening — an evening however, as 
it turned out, not less breathless than the day. 

In the great heat Apollyon had flung aside, as if 
for ever, the last sorry remnant of his workman's attire, 
and challenged the boy to do the same. On the 
moonlit turf there, crouching, right foot foremost, and 
with face turned backwards to the disk in his right 
hand, his whole body, in that moment of rest, full 
of the circular motion he is about to commit to it, he 
seemed — beautiful pale spectre — to shine from within 
with a light of his own, like that of the glow-worm in 
the thicket, or the dead and rotten roots of the old 
trees. And as if they had a proper motion of their 
own in them, the disks, the quoits, ran, amid the 
dehghted shouts and laughter of the boy, as he fol- 
lows, scarcely less swift, to score the points of their 
contact with the grass. Again and again they recom- 
mence, forgetful of the hours ; while the death-bell 
cries out harshly for the grave's occupant, and the 
corpse itself is borne along stealthily not far from them, 
and, unnoticed by either, the entire aspect of things has 
changed. Under the overcast sky it is in darkness 
they are playing, by guess and touch chiefly ; and sud- 
denly an icy blast of wind has lifted the roof from the 
old chapel, the trees are moaning in wild circular 
motion, and their devil's penny-piece, when Apollyon 
throws it for the last time, is itself but a twirling leaf 
in the wind, till it sinks edgewise, sawing through the 



144 APOLLO IN PICARDY 

boy's face, uplifted in the dark to trace it, crushing in 
the tender skull upon the brain. 

His shout of laughter is turned in an instant to a 
cry of pain, of reproach ; and in that which echoed it 
— an immense cry, as from the very heart of ancient 
tragedy, over the Picard wolds — it was as if that half- 
extinguished deity, its proper immensity, its old great- 
ness and power, were restored for a moment. The 
villagers in their beds wondered. It was like the 
sound of some natural catastrophe. 

The storm which followed was still in possession, 
still moving tearfully among the poplar groves, though 
it had spent its heat and thunder. The last drops of 
the blood of Hyacinth still trickled through the thick 
masses of dark hair, where the tonsure had been. 
An abundant rain, mingling with the copious purple 
stream, had coloured the grass all around where the 
corpse lay, stealing afar in tiny channels. So it was, 
when ApoUyon, reduced in the morning light to his 
smaller self, came with the other people of the Grange 
to gaze, to enquire, and found the Prior already there, 
speechless. Clearly this was no lightning stroke ; and 
Apollyon straightway conceives certain very human 
fears that, coming upon those antecedent suspicions of 
himself, the boy's death may be thought the result of 
intention on his part. He proposes to bury the body 
at once, with no delay for religious rites, in that still 
uncovered grave, the bearers having fled from it in the 
tempest. 

And next day, fulfilling his annual custom, he went 
his way northward, without a word of farewell to 



APOLLO IN PICARDY 145 

Prior Saint -Jean, whom he leaves in fact under sus- 
picion of murder. From the profound slumber which 
had followed the excitements of yesterday, the Prior 
awoke amid the sound of voices, the voices of the 
peasants singing no Christian song, certainly, but 
a song which ApoUyon himself had taught them, to 
dismiss him on his journey. For, strange or not as 
it might be, they loved him, perhaps in spite of them- 
selves ; would certainly protect him at any risk. Prior 
Saint-Jean arose, and looked forth — with wonder. A 
brief spell of sunshine amid the rain had clothed the 
vale with a marvel of blue flowers, if it were not rather 
with remnants of the blue sky itself, fallen among the 
woods there. But there too, in the little courtyard, 
the officers of justice are already in waiting to take 
him, on the charge of having caused the death of his 
young server by violence, in a fit of mania, induced by 
dissolute living in that solitary place. One hitherto 
so prosperous in life would, of course, have his 
enemies. 

The monastic authorities, however, claim him from 
the secular power, to correct his offence in their own 
way, and with friendly interpretation of the facts. 
Madness, however wicked, being still madness. Prior, 
now simple Brother, Saint-Jean, is detained in a suffi- 
ciently cheerful apartment, in a region of the atmo- 
sphere likely to restore lost wits, whence indeed he can 
still see the country — vallis monachorum. The one 
desire which from time to time fitfully rouses him again 
to animation for a few moments is to return thither. 
Here then he remains in peace, ostensibly for the com- 

L 



146 APOLLO IN PICARDY 

pletion of his great work. He never again set pen to 
it, consistent and clear now on nothing save that long- 
ing to be once more at the Grange, that he may get 
well, or die and be well so. He is like the damned 
spirit, think some of the brethren, saying " I will return 
to the house whence I came out." Gazing thither 
daily for many hours, he would mistake mere blue 
distance, when that was visible, for blue flowers, for 
hyacinths, and wept at the sight ; though blue, as he 
observed, was the colour of Holy Mary's gown on the 
illuminated page, the colour of hope, of merciful omni- 
present deity. The necessary permission came with 
difiiculty, just too late. Brother Saint-Jean died, 
standing upright with an effort to gaze forth once 
more, amid the preparations for his departure. 



THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE.^ 

As Florian Deleal walked, one hot afternoon, he 
overtook by the wayside a poor aged man, and, as 
he seemed weary with the road, helped him on with 
the burden which he carried, a certain distance. And 
as the man told his story, it chanced that he named 
the place, a little place in the neighbourhood o( 
a great city, where Florian had passed his earliest 
years, but which he had never since seen, and, the 
story told, went forward on his journey comforted. 
And that night, like a reward for his pity, a dream of 
that place came to Florian, a dream which did for 
him the office of the finer sort of memory, bringing 
its object to mind with a great clearness, yet, as 
sometimes happens in dreams, raised a little above 
itself, and above ordinary retrospect. The true 
aspect of the place, especially of the house there in 
which he had lived as a child, the fashion of its doors, 
its hearths, its windows, the very scent upon the air 
of it, was with him in sleep for a season ; only, with 
tints more musically blent on wall and floor, and 
some finer light and shadow running in and out along 

1 Published in Macmillan s Magazine, Aug. 1878. 
147 



148 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 

its curves and angles, and with all its little carvings 
daintier. He awoke with a sigh at the thought of 
almost thirty years which lay between him and that 
place, yet with a flutter of pleasure still within him at 
the fair light, as if it were a smile, upon it. And it 
happened that this accident of his dream was just the 
thing needed for the beginning of a certain design he 
then had in view, the noting, namely, of some things 
in the story of his spirit — in that process of brain- 
building by which we are, each one of us, what we 
are. With the image of the place so clear and 
favourable upon him, he fell to thinking of himself 
therein, and how his thoughts had grown up to him. 
In that half-spiritualised house he could watch the 
better, over again, the gradual expansion of the soul 
which had come to be there — of which indeed, through 
the law which makes the material objects about them 
so large an element in children's lives, it had actually 
become a part; inward and outward being woven 
through and through each other into one inextricable 
texture — half, tint and trace and accident of homely 
colour and form, from the wood and the bricks ; 
half, mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows 
how far. In the house and garden of his dream he 
saw a child moving, and could divide the main streams 
at least of the winds that had played on him, and 
study so the first stage in that mental journey. 

The old house, as when Florian talked of it after- 
wards he always called it, (as all children do, who can 
recollect a change of home, soon enough but not too 
soon to mark a period in their lives) really was an old 



THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 149 

house ; and an element of French descent in its in- 
mates — descent from Watteau, the old court-painter, 
one of whose gallant pieces still hung in one of the 
rooms — might explain, together with some other things, 
a noticeable trimness and comely whiteness about 
everything there — the curtains, the couches, the paint 
on the walls with which the light and shadow played 
so delicately ; might explain also the tolerance of the 
great poplar in the garden, a tree most often despised 
by English people, but which French people love, 
having observed a certain fresh way its leaves have of 
dealing with the wind, making it sound, in never so 
slight a stirring of the air, like running water. 

The old-fashioned, low wainscoting went round the 
rooms, and up the staircase with carved balusters and 
shadowy angles, landing half-way up at a broad 
window, with a swallow's nest below the sill, and the 
blossom of an old pear-tree showing across it in late 
April, against the blue, below which the perfumed 
juice of the find of fallen fruit in autumn was so 
fresh. At the next turning came the closet which 
held on its deep shelves the best china. Little angel 
faces and reedy flutings stood out round the fire- 
place of the children's room. And on the top of the 
house, above the large attic, where the white mice ran 
in the tv/ilight — an infinite, unexplored wonderland of 
childish treasures, glass beads, empty scent-bottles 
still sweet, thrum of coloured silks, among its lumber 
— a flat space of roof, railed round, gave a view of the 
neighbouring steeples ; for the house, as I said, stood 
near a great city, which sent up heavenwards, over 



ISO THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 

the twisting weather-vanes, not seldom, its beds of 
roUing cloud and smoke, touched with storm or sun- 
shine. But the child of whom I am writing did not 
hate the fog because of the crimson lights which fell 
from it sometimes upon the chimneys, and the whites 
which gleamed through its openings, on summer morn- 
ings, on turret or pavement. For it is false to suppose 
that a child's sense of beauty is dependent on any 
choiceness or special fineness, in the objects which pre- 
sent themselves to it, though this indeed comes to be 
the rule with most of us in later life ; earlier, in some 
degree, we see inwardly ; and the child finds for itself, 
and with unstinted delight, a difference for the sense, 
in those whites and reds through the smoke on very 
homely buildings, and in the gold of the dandelions at 
the road-side, just beyond the houses, where not a 
handful of earth is virgin and untouched, in the lack 
of better ministries to its desire of beauty. 

This house then stood not far beyond the gloom 
and rumours of the town, among high garden-wall, 
bright all summer-time with Golden-rod, and brown- 
and-golden Wall-flower — Flos Parte tis, as the children's 
Latin-reading father taught them to call it, while he 
was with them. Tracing back the threads of his com- 
plex spiritual habit, as he was used in after years to 
do, Florian found that he owed to the place many 
tones of sentiment afterwards customary with him, 
certain inward lights under which things most natu- 
rally presented themselves to him. The coming and 
going of travellers to the town along the way, the 
shadow of the streets, the sudden breath of the 



THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 151 

neighbouring gardens, the singular brightness of 
bright weather there, its singular darknesses which 
hnked themselves in his mind to certain engraved 
illustrations in the old big Bible at home, the coolness 
of the dark, cavernous shops round the great church, 
with its giddy winding stair up to the pigeons and the 
bells — a citadel of peace in the heart of the trouble — 
all this acted on his childish fancy, so that ever after- 
wards the like aspects and incidents never failed to 
throw him into a well-recognised imaginative mood, 
seeming actually to have become a part of the texture 
of his mind. Also, Florian could trace home to this 
point a pervading preference in himself for a kind 
of comehness and dignity, an urbanity literally, in 
modes of life, which he connected with the pale 
people of towns, and which made him susceptible to 
a kind of exquisite satisfaction in the trimness and 
well-considered grace of certain things and persons 
he afterwards met with, here and there, in his way 
through the world- 

So the child of whom I am writing lived on there 
quietly ; things without thus ministering to him, as 
he sat daily at the window with the birdcage hanging 
below it, and his mother taught him to read, wonder- 
ing at the ease with which he learned, and at the 
quickness of his memory. The perfume of the httle 
flowers of the lime-tree fell through the air upon 
them like rain ; while time seemed to move ever more 
slowly to the murmur of the bees in it, till it almost 
stood still on June afternoons. How insignificant, at 
the moment, seem the influences of the sensible things 



152 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 

which are tossed and fall and lie about us, so, or so, in 
the environment of early childhood. How indelibly, 
as we afterwards discover, they affect us ; with what 
capricious attractions and associations they figure 
themselves on the white paper, the smooth wax, of 
our ingenuous souls, as "with lead in the rock for 
ever," giving form and feature, and as it were assigned 
house-room in our memory, to early experiences of 
feeling and thought, which abide with us ever after- 
wards, thus, and not otherwise. The realities and 
passions, the rumours of the greater world without, 
steal in upon us, each by its own special little passage- 
way, through the wall of custom about us ; and never 
afterwards quite detach themselves from this or that 
accident, or trick, in the mode of their first entrance to 
us. Our susceptibilities, the discovery of our powers, 
manifold experiences — our various experiences of the 
coming and going of bodily pain, for instance — belong 
to this or the other well-remembered place in the 
material habitation — that little white room with the 
window across which the heavy blossoms could beat 
so peevishly in the wind, with just that particular 
catch or throb, such a sense of teasing in it, on gusty 
mornings; and the early habitation thus gradually 
becomes a sort of material shrine or sanctuary of senti- 
ment ; a system of visible symbolism interweaves itself 
through all our thoughts and passions ; and irresistibly, 
little shapes, voices, accidents — the angle at which 
the sun in the morning fell on the pillow — become 
parts of the great chain wherewith we are bound. 
Thus far, for Florian, what all this had determined 



THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 153 

was a peculiarly strong sense of home — so forcible 
a motive with all of us — prompting to us our cus- 
tomary love of the earth, and the larger part of our 
fear of death, that revulsion we have from it, as from 
something strange, untried, unfriendly; though life- 
long imprisonment, they tell you, and final banishment 
from home is a thing bitterer still; the looking for- 
ward to but a short space, a mere childish goiUer and 
dessert of it, before the end, being so great a resource 
of effort to pilgrims and wayfarers, and the soldier in 
distant quarters, and lending, in lack of that, some 
power of solace to the thought of sleep in the home 
churchyard, at least — dead cheek by dead cheek, and 
with the rain soaking in upon one from above. 

So powerful is this instinct, and yet accidents like 
those I have been speaking of so mechanically deter- 
mine it ; its essence being indeed the early familiar, as 
constituting our ideal, or typical conception, of rest and 
security. Out of so many possible conditions, just this 
for you and that for me, brings ever the unmistakeable 
realisation of the delightful chez sot; this for the 
Englishman, for me and you, with the closely-drawn 
white curtain and the shaded lamp ; that, quite other, 
for the wandering Arab, who folds his tent every 
morning, and makes his sleeping-place among haunted 
ruins, or in old tombs. 

With Florian then the sense of home became sin- 
gularly intense, his good fortune being that the special 
character of his home was in itself so essentially 
home-like. As after many wanderings I have come 
to fancy that some parts of Surrey and Kent are, for 



154 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 

Englishmen, the true landscape, true home-counties, 
by right, partly, of a certain earthy warmth in the 
yellow of the sand below their gorse-bushes, and of a 
certain grey-blue mist after rain, in the hollows of the 
hills there, welcome to fatigued eyes, and never seen 
farther south ; so I think that the sort of house I have 
described, with precisely those proportions of red- 
brick and green, and with a just perceptible monotony 
in the subdued order of it, for its distinguishing note, 
is for Englishmen at least typically home-life. And 
so for Florian that general human instinct was rein- 
forced by this special home-likeness in the place his 
wandering soul had happened to light on, as, in the 
second degree, its body and earthly tabernacle ; the 
sense of harmony between his soul and its phys- 
ical environment became, for a time at least, like 
perfectly played music, and the life led there singularly 
tranquil and filled with a curious sense of self- 
possession. The love of security, of an habitually 
undisputed standing-ground or sleeping-place, came 
to count for much in the generation and correcting of 
his thoughts, and afterwards as a salutary principle of 
restraint in all his wanderings of spirit. The wistful 
yearning towards home, in absence from it, as the 
shadows of evening deepened, and he followed in 
thought what was doing there from hour to hour, 
interpreted to him much of a yearning and regret 
he experienced afterwards, towards he knew not what, 
out of strange ways of feeling and thought in which, 
from time to time, his spirit found itself alone ; and in 
the tears shed in such absences there seemed always 



THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 155 

to be some soul-subduing foretaste of what his last 
tears might be. 

And the sense of security could hardly have been 
deeper, the quiet of the child's soul being one with 
the quiet of its home, a place " inclosed " and " sealed." 
But upon this assured place, upon the child's assured 
soul which resembled it, there came floating in from 
the larger world without, as at windows left ajar 
unknowingly, or over the high garden walls, two 
streams of impressions, the sentiments of beauty and 
pain — recognitions of the visible, tangible, audible 
loveliness of things, as a very real and somewhat 
tyrannous element in them — and of the sorrow of the 
world, of grown people and children and animals, as 
a thing not to be put by in them. From this point 
he could trace two predominant processes of mental 
change in him — the growth of an almost diseased 
sensibility to the spectacle of suffering, and, parallel 
with this, the rapid growth of a certain capacity of 
fascination by bright colour and choice form — 
the sweet curvings, for instance, of the lips of those 
who seemed to him comely persons, modulated in 
such delicate unison to the things they said or sang, 
— marking early the activity in him of a more than 
customary sensuousness, " the lust of the eye," as the 
Preacher says, which might lead him, one day, how 
far ! Could he have foreseen the weariness of the 
way ! In music sometimes the two sorts of impres- 
sions came together, and he would weep, to the 
surprise of older people. Tears of joy too the child 
knew, also to older people's surprise ; real tears, once. 



156 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 

of relief from long-strung, childish expectation, when 
he found returned at evening, with new roses in her 
cheeks, the little sister who had been to a place 
where there was a wood, and brought back for him 
a treasure of fallen acorns, and black crow's feathers, 
and his peace at finding her again near him mingled 
all night with some intimate sense of the distant 
forest, the rumour of its breezes, with the glossy 
blackbirds aslant and the branches lifted in them, and 
of the perfect nicety of the Uttle cups that fell. So 
those two elementary apprehensions of the tenderness 
and of the colour in things grew apace in him, and 
were seen by him afterwards to send their roots back 
into the beginnings of life. 

Let me note first some of the occasions of his recog- 
nition of the element of pain in things — incidents, 
now and again, which seemed suddenly to awake in 
him the whole force of that sentiment which Goethe 
has called the WeltscJwierz, and in which the concen- 
trated sorrow of the world seemed suddenly to lie 
heavy upon him, A book lay in an old book-case, of 
which he cared to remember one picture — a woman 
sitting, with hands bound behind her, the dress, the 
cap, the hair, folded with a simplicity which touched 
him strangely, as if not by her own hands, but with 
some ambiguous care at the hands of others — Queen 
Marie Antoinette, on her way to execution — we all 
remember David's drawing, meant merely to make 
her ridiculous. The face that had been so high had 
learned to be mute and resistless ; but out of its very 
resistlessness, seemed now to call on men to have 



THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 157 

pity, and forbear; and he took note of that, as he 
closed the book, as a thing to look at again, if he 
should at any time find himself tempted to be cruel. 
Again, he would never quite forget the appeal in the 
small sister's face, in the garden under the lilacs, 
terrified at a spider lighted on her sleeve. He could 
trace back to the look then noted a certain mercy he 
conceived always for people in fear, even of little 
things, which seemed to make him, though but for a 
moment, capable of almost any sacrifice of himself. 
Impressible, susceptible persons, indeed, who had had 
their sorrows, lived about him ; and this sensibihty 
was due in part to the tacit influence of their presence, 
enforcing upon him habitually the fact that there are 
those who pass their days, as a matter of course, in 
a sort of " going quietly." Most poignantly of all 
he could recall, in unfading minutest circumstance, 
the cry on the stair, sounding bitterly through the 
house, and struck into his soul for ever, of an aged 
woman, his father's sister, come now to announce his 
death in distant India ; how it seemed to make the 
aged woman like a child again ; and, he knew not 
why, but this fancy was full of pity to him. There 
were the little sorrows of the dumb animals too — 
of the white angora, with a dark tail like an ermine's, 
and a face like a flower, who fell into a lingering sick- 
ness, and became quite deHcately human in its valetu- 
dinarianism, and came to have a hundred different 
expressions of voice — how it grew worse and worse, 
till it began to feel the hght too much for it, and at 
last, after one wild morning of pain, the little soul 



158 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 

flickered away from the body, quite worn to death 
already, and now but feebly retaining it. 

So he wanted another pet ; and as there were star- 
lings about the place, which could be taught to 
speak, one of them was caught, and he meant to treat 
it kindly ; but in the night its young ones could be 
heard crying after it, and the responsive cry of the 
mother-bird towards them ; and at last, with the first 
light, though not till after some debate with himself, 
he went down and opened the cage, and saw a sharp 
bound of the prisoner up to her nestlings ; and there- 
with came the sense of remorse, — that he too was 
become an accomplice in moving, to the limit of his 
small power, the springs and handles of that great 
machine in things, constructed so ingeniously to play 
pain-fugues on the delicate nerve-work of living 
creatures. 

I have remarked how, in the process of our brain- 
building, as the house of thought in which we live gets 
itself together, like some airy bird's-nest of floating 
thistle-down and chance straws, compact at last, little 
accidents have their consequence ; and thus it hap- 
pened that, as he walked one evening, a garden gate, 
usually closed, stood open ; and lo ! within, a great 
red hawthorn in full flower, embossing heavily the 
bleached and twisted trunk and branches, so aged 
that there were but few green leaves thereon — a 
plumage of tender, crimson fire out of the heart of 
the dry wood. The perfume of the tree had now 
and again reached him, in the currents of the wind, 
over the wall, and he had wondered what might be 



THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 159 

behind it, and was now allowed to fill his arms with the 
flowers — flowers enough for all the old blue-china pots 
along the chimney-piece, making/efe in the children's 
room. Was it some periodic moment in the expan- 
sion of soul within him, or mere trick of heat in the 
heavily-laden summer air? But the beauty of the 
thing struck home to him feverishly ; and in dreams 
all night he loitered along a magic roadway of crim- 
son flowers, which seemed to open ruddily in thick, 
fresh masses about his feet, and fill softly all the little 
hollows in the banks on either side. Always after- 
wards, summer by summer, as the flowers came on, 
the blossom of the red hawthorn still seemed to him 
absolutely the reddest of all things ; and the goodly 
crimson, still alive in the works of old Venetian 
masters or old Flemish tapestries, called out always 
from afar the recollection of the flame in those perish- 
ing little petals, as it pulsed gradually out of them, 
kept long in the drawers of an old cabinet. Also 
then, for the first time, he seemed to experience 
a passionateness in his relation to fair outward ob- 
jects, an inexplicable excitement in their presence, 
which disturbed him, and from which he half longed 
to be free. A touch of regret or desire mingled all 
night with the remembered presence of the red 
flowers, and their perfume in the darkness about 
him ; and the longing for some undivined, entire 
possession of them was the beginning of a revelation 
to him, growing ever clearer, with the coming of the 
gracious summer guise of fields and trees and persons 
in each succeeding year, of a certain, at times seem- 



160 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 

ingly exclusive, predominance in his interests, of 
beautiful physical things, a kind of tyranny of the 
senses over him. 

In later years he came upon philosophies which 
occupied him much in the estimate of the proportion 
of the sensuous and the ideal elements in human 
knowledge, the relative parts they bear in it ; andj 
in his intellectual scheme, was led to assign very little 
to the abstract thought, and much to its sensible vehi- 
cle or occasion. Such metaphysical speculation did 
but reinforce what was instinctive in his way of receiving 
the world, and for him, everywhere, that sensible vehi- 
cle or occasion became, perhaps only too surely, the 
necessary concomitant of any perception of things, 
real enough to be of any Aveight or reckoning, in his 
house of thought. There were times when he could 
think of the necessity he was under of associating all 
thoughts to touch and sight, as a sympathetic link 
between himself and actual, feeling, living objects ; 
a protest in favour of real men and women against 
mere grey, unreal abstractions; and he remembered 
gratefully how the Christian religion, hardly less than 
the religion of the ancient Greeks, translating so much 
of its spiritual verity into things that may be seen, 
condescends in part to sanction this infirmity, if so 
it be, of our human existence, wherein the world of 
sense is so much with us, and welcomed this thought 
as a kind of keeper and sentinel over his soul therein. 
But certainly, he came more and more to be unable 
to care for, or think of soul but as in an actual body, 
or of any world but that wherein are water and trees, 



THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 161 

and where men and women look, so or so, and press 
actual hands. It was the trick even his pity learned, 
fastening those who suffered in anywise to his affec- 
tions by a kind of sensible attachments. He would 
think of Julian, fallen into incurable sickness, as spoiled 
in the sweet blossom of his skin like pale amber, and 
his honey-like hair ; of Cecil, early dead, as cut off from 
the lilies, from golden summer days, from women's 
voices ; and then what comforted him a little was the 
thought of the turning of the child's flesh to violets 
in the turf above him. And thinking of the very 
poor, it was not the things which most men care most 
for that he yearned to give them; but fairer roses, 
perhaps, and power to taste quite as they will, at their 
ease and not task-burdened, a certain desirable, clear 
light in the new morning, through which sometimes 
he had noticed them, quite unconscious of it, on their 
way to their early toil. 

So he yielded himself to these things, to be played 
upon by them like a musical instrument, and began to 
note with deepening watchfulness, but always with 
some puzzled, unutterable longing in his enjoyment, 
the phases of the seasons and of the growing or wan- 
ing day, down even to the shadowy changes wrought 
on bare wall or ceiling — the light cast up from the 
snow, bringing out their darkest angles ; the brown 
light in the cloud, which meant rain ; that almost too 
austere clearness, in the protracted light of the length- 
ening day, before warm weather began, as if it lingered 
but to make a severer workday, with the school-books 
opened earlier and later ; that beam of June sunshine. 



162 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 

at last, as he lay awake before the time, a way of gold- 
dust across the darkness ; all the humming, the fresh- 
ness, the perfume of the garden seemed to lie upon 
it — and coming in one afternoon in September, 
along the red gravel walk, to look for a basket of 
yellow crab-apples left in the cool, old parlour, he 
remembered it the more, and how the colours struck 
upon him, because a wasp on one bitten apple stung 
him, and he felt the passion of sudden, severe pain. 
For this too brought its curious reflexions; and, in 
relief from it, he would wonder over it — how it had 
then been with him — puzzled at the depth of the 
charm or spell over him, which lay, for a little while 
at least, in the mere absence of pain ; once, especially, 
when an older boy taught him to make flowers of 
sealing-wax, and he had burnt his hand badly at the 
lighted taper, and been unable to sleep. He remem- 
bered that also afterwards, as a sort of typical thing 
— a white vision of heat about him, clinging closely, 
through the languid scent of the ointments put upon 
the place to make it well. 

Also, as he felt this pressure upon him of the 
sensible world, then, as often afterwards, there would 
come another sort of curious questioning how the last 
impressions of eye and ear might happen to him, 
how they would find him — the scent of the last flower, 
the soft yellowness of the last morning, the last recog- 
nition of some object of affection, hand or voice ; it 
could not be but that the latest look of the eyes, before 
their final closing, would be strangely vivid ; one would 
go with the hot tears, the cry, the touch of the wistful 



THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 163 

bystander, impressed how deeply on one ! or would 
it be, perhaps, a mere frail retiring of all things, great 
or little, away from one, into a level distance ? 

For with this desire of physical beauty mingled 
itself early the fear of death — the fear of death inten- 
sified by the desire of beauty. Hitherto he had never 
gazed upon dead faces, as sometimes, afterwards, at 
the Morgue in Paris, or in that fair cemetery at Munich, 
where all the dead must go and lie in state before 
burial, behind glass windows, among the flowers and 
incense and holy candles — the aged clergy with their 
sacred ornaments, the young men in their dancing- 
shoes and spotless white linen — after which visits, 
those waxen, resistless faces would always live with 
him for many days, making the broadest sunshine 
sickly. The child had heard indeed of the death of 
his father, and how, in the Indian station, a fever had 
taken him, so that though not in action he had yet 
died as a soldier ; and hearing of the '' resurrection of 
the just," he could think of him as still abroad in the 
world, somehow, for his protection — a grand, though 
perhaps rather terrible figure, in beautiful soldier's 
things, like the figure in the picture of Joshua's Vision 
in the Bible — and of that, round which the mourners 
moved so softly, and afterwards v/ith such solemn 
singing, as but a worn-out garment left at a deserted 
lodging. So it was, until on a summer day he walked 
with his mother through a fair churchyard. In a 
bright dress he rambled among the graves, in the gay 
weather, and so came, in one corner, upon an open 
grave for a child — a dark space on the brilliant grass 



164 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 

— the black mould lying heaped up round it, weighing 
down the little jewelled branches of the dwarf rose- 
bushes in flower. And therewith came, full-grown, 
never wholly to leave him, with the certainty that even 
children do sometimes die, the physical horror of death, 
with its wholly selfish recoil from the association of 
lower forms of life, and the suffocating weight above. 
No benign, grave figure in beautiful soldier's things 
any longer abroad in the world for his protection ! 
only a few poor, piteous bones ; and above them, 
possibly, a certain sort of figure he hoped not to see. 
For sitting one day in the garden below an open 
window, he heard people talking, and could not but 
listen, how, in a sleepless hour, a sick woman had 
seen one of the dead sitting beside her, come to call 
her hence ; and from the broken talk evolved with 
much clearness the notion that not all those dead peo- 
ple had really departed to the churchyard, nor were 
quite so motionless as they looked, but led a secret, 
half-fugitive life in their old homes, quite free by night, 
though sometimes visible in the day, dodging from 
room to room, with no great goodwill towards those 
who shared the place with them. All night the 
figure sat beside him in the reveries of his broken 
sleep, and was not quite gone in the morning — an odd, 
irreconcileable new member of the household, making 
the sweet famihar chambers unfriendly and suspect by 
its uncertain presence. He could have hated the dead 
he had pitied so, for being thus. Afterwards he came 
to think of those poor, home-returning ghosts, which 
all men have fancied to themselves — the reve^iants — 



THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 165 

pathetically, as crying, or beating with vain hands at 
the doors, as the wind came, their cries distinguishable 
in it as a wilder inner note. But, always making 
death more unfamiliar still, that old experience would 
ever, from time to time, return to him ; even in the 
living he sometimes caught its likeness ; at any time 
or place, in a moment, the faint atmosphere of the 
chamber of death would be breathed around him, and 
the image with the bound chin, the quaint smile, the 
straight, stiff feet, shed itself across the air upon the 
bright carpet, amid the gayest company, or happiest 
communing with himself. 

To most children the sombre questionings to which 
impressions like these attach themselves, if they come 
at all, are actually suggested by religious books, which 
therefore they often regard with much secret distaste, 
and dismiss, as far as possible, from their habitual 
thoughts as a too depressing element in life. To 
Florian such impressions, these misgivings as to the 
ultimate tendency of the years, of the relationship 
between life and death, had been suggested spon- 
taneously in the natural course of his mental growth 
by a strong innate sense for the soberer tones in things, 
further strengthened by actual circumstances ; and 
religious sentiment, that system of biblical ideas in 
which he had been brought up, presented itself to him 
as a thing that might soften and dignify, and light up 
as with a " lively hope," a melancholy already deeply 
settled in him. So he yielded himself easily to relig- 
ious impressions, and with a kind of mystical appetite 
for sacred things ; the more as they came to him 



166 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 

through a saintly person who loved him tenderly, and 
believed that this early pre-occupation with them 
already marked the child out for a saint. He began 
to love, for their own sakes, church lights, holy days, 
all that belonged to the comely order of the sanctuary, 
the secrets of its white linen, and holy vessels, and 
fonts of pure water ; and its hieratic purity and 
simplicity became the type of something he desired 
always to have about him in actual life. He pored 
over the pictures in religious books, and knew by 
heart the exact mode in which the wrestling angel 
grasped Jacob, how Jacob looked in his mysterious 
sleep, how the bells and pomegranates were attached 
to the hem of Aaron's vestment, sounding sweetly as 
he glided over the turf of the holy place. His way of 
conceiving religion came then to be in effect what it 
ever afterwards remained — a sacred history indeed, 
but still more a sacred ideal, a transcendent version 
or representation, under intenser and more expressive 
light and shade, of human life and its famihar or 
exceptional incidents, birth, death, marriage, youth, 
age, tears, joy, rest, sleep, waking — a mirror, towards 
which men might turn away their eyes from vanity 
and dullness, and see themselves therein as angels, 
with their daily meat and drink, even, become a kind 
of sacred transaction — a complementary strain or 
burden, applied to our every-day existence, whereby 
the stray snatches of music in it re-set themselves, and 
fall into the scheme of some higher and more con- 
sistent harmony. A place adumbrated itself in his 
thoughts, wherein those sacred personalities, which are 



THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 167 

at once the reflex and the pattern of our nobler phases 
of life, housed themselves ; and this region in his intel- 
lectual scheme all subsequent experience did but tend 
still further to realise and define. Some ideal, hieratic 
persons he would always need to occupy it and keep 
a warmth there. And he could hardly understand 
those who felt no such need at all, finding themselves 
quite happy without such heavenly companionship, 
and sacred double of their life, beside them. 

Thus a constant substitution of the typical for the 
actual took place in his thoughts. Angels might 
be met by the way, under English elm or beech- 
tree ; mere messengers seemed like angels, bound on 
celestial errands ; a deep mysticity brooded over 
real meetings and partings ; marriages were made in 
heaven ; and deaths also, with hands of angels there- 
upon, to bear soul and body quietly asunder, each to 
its appointed rest. All the acts and accidents of daily 
life borrowed a sacred colour and significance ; the 
very colours of things became themselves weighty 
with meanings like the sacred stuffs of Moses' tab- 
ernacle, full of penitence or peace. Sentiment, con- 
gruous in the first instance only with those divine 
transactions, the deep, effusive unction of the House 
of Bethany, was assumed as the due attitude for the re- 
ception of our every-day existence ; and for a time he 
walked through the world in a sustained, not unpleasur- 
able awe, generated by the habitual recognition, beside 
every circumstance and event of life, or its celestial 
correspondent. 

SensibiHty — the desire of physical beauty — a strange 



168 THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 

biblical awe, which made any reference to the unseen 
act on him like solemn music — these qualities the child 
took away with him, when, at about the age of twelve 
years, he left the old house, and was taken to live in 
another place. He had never left home before, and, 
anticipating much from this change, had long dreamed 
over it, jealously counting the days till the time fixed 
for departure should come ; had been a little careless 
about others even, in his strong desire for it — when 
Lewis fell sick, for instance, and they must wait still 
two days longer. At last the morning came, very 
fine ; and all things — the very pavement with its dust, 
at the roadside — seemed to have a white, pearl-like 
lustre in them. They were to travel by a favourite 
road on which he had often walked a certain distance, 
and on one of those two prisoner days, when Lewis 
was sick, had walked farther than ever before, in his 
great desire to reach the new place. They had started 
and gone a little way when a pet bird was found to 
have been left behind, and must even now — so it 
presented itself to him — have already all the appealing 
fierceness and wild self-pity at heart of one left by 
others to perish of hunger in a closed house ; and he 
returned to fetch it, himself in hardly less stormy 
distress. But as he passed in search of it from room 
to room, lying so pale, with a look of meekness in 
their denudation, and at last through that little, 
stripped white room, the aspect of the place touched 
him like the face of one dead ; and a clinging back 
towards it came over him, so inl-ense that he knew it 
would last long, and spoiling all his pleasure in the 



THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE 169 

realisation of a thing so eagerly anticipated. And so, 
with the bird found, but himself in an agony of home- 
sickness, thus capriciously sprung up within him, he 
was driven quickly away, far into the rural distance, 
so fondly speculated on, of that favourite country- 
road. 



EMERALD UTHWART.^ 

We smile at epitaphs — at those recent enough to be 
read easily ; smile, for the most part, at what for the 
most part is an unreal and often vulgar branch of 
literature ; yet a wide one, with its flowers here or 
there, such as make us regret now and again not to 
have gathered more carefully in our wanderings a fair 
average of the like. Their very simplicity, of course, 
may set one's thoughts in motion to fill up the scanty 
tale, and those of the young at least are almost always 
worth while. At Siena, for instance, in the great 
Dominican church, even with the impassioned work 
of Sodonia at hand, you may linger in a certain dimly 
lit chapel to spell out the black-letter memorials of the 
German students who died here — cetatisflore! — at the 
University, famous early in the last century; young 
nobles chiefly, far from the Rhine, from Nuremberg, 
or Leipsic. Note one in particular ! Loving parents 
and elder brother meant to record carefully the 
very days of the lad's poor life — annos, menses, dies ,• 

1 Published in the New Review, June and July 1892, and now 
reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors. 
170 



EMERALD UTHWART 171 

sent the order, doubtless, from the distant old castle 
in the Fatherland, but not quite explicitly ; the spaces 
for the numbers remain still unfilled ; and they never 
came to see. After two centuries the omission is not 
to be rectified ; and the young man's memorial has 
perhaps its propriety as it stands, with those un- 
numbered, or numberless, days. " Full of affections," 
observed, once upon a time, a great lover of boys and 
young men, speaking to a large company of them : — 
" full of affections, full of powers, full of occupation, how 
naturally might the younger part of us especially (more 
naturally than the older) receive the tidings that there 
are things to be loved and things to be done which 
shall never pass away. We feel strong, we feel active, 
we feel full of life ; and these feelings do not altogether 
deceive us, for we shall live for ever. We see a long 
prospect before us, for which it is worth while to work, 
even with much labour ; for we are as yet young, and 
the past portion of our lives is but small in comparison 
of that which probably remains to us. It is most true ! 
The past years of our life are absolutely beyond pro- 
portion small in comparison with those which certainly 
remain to us." 

In a very different neighbourhood, here at home, in 
a remote Sussex churchyard, you may read that 
Emerald Uthwart was born on such a day, " at Chase 
Lodge, in this parish; and died there," on a day in 
the year i8 — , aged twenty-six. Think, thereupon, of 
the years of a very English existence passed without 
a lost week in that bloomy English place, amid its 
English lawns and flower-beds, its oldish brick and 



172 EMERALD UTHWART 

raftered plaster ; you may see it still, not far off, on 
a clearing of the wooded hill-side sloping gradually to 
the sea. But you think wrong. Emerald Uthwart, in 
almost unbroken absence from his home, longed greatly 
for it, but left it early and came back there only to die, 
in disgrace, as he conceived ; of which it was he died 
there, finding the sense of the place all around him at 
last, like blessed oil in one's wounds. 

How they shook their musk from them! — those 
gardens, among which the youngest son, but not the 
youngest child, grew up, little considered till he 
returned there in those last years. The rippling 
note of the birds he distinguished so acutely seemed 
a part of this tree-less place, open freely to sun and 
air, such as rose and carnation loved, in the midst of 
the old disafforested chase. Brothers and sisters, all 
aUke were gardeners, methodically intimate with their 
flowers. You need words compact rather of perfume 
than of colour to describe them, in nice annual order ; 
terms for perfume, as immediate and definite as red, 
purple, and yellow. Flowers there were which seemed 
to yield their sweetest in the faint sea-salt, when the 
loosening wind was strong from the south-west ; some 
which found their way slowly towards the neighbour- 
hood of the old oaks and beech-trees. Others con- 
sorted most freely with the wall-fruit, or seemed made 
for pot-pourri to sweeten the old black mahogany 
furniture. The sweet-pea stacks loved the broad path 
through the kitchen garden ; the old-fashioned garden 
azalea was the making of a nosegay, with its honey 
which clung to one's finger. There were flowers all 



EMERALD UTHWART 173 

the sweeter for a battle with the rain ; a flower like 
aromatic medicine ; another like summer lingering 
into winter ; it ripened as fruit does ; and another was 
like August, his own birthday time, dropped into 
March. 

The very mould here, rich old black gardener's 
earth, was flower-seed ; and beyond, the fields, one 
after another, through the white gates breaking the 
well-grown hedge-rows, were hardly less garden-like ; 
little velvety fields, little with the true sweet English 
littleness of our little island, our land of vignettes. 
Here all was little ; the very church where they went 
to pray, to sit, the ancient Uthwarts sleeping all around 
outside under the windows, deposited there as quietly 
as fallen trees on their native soil, and almost unre- 
corded, as there had been almost nothing to record ; 
where however, Sunday after Sunday, Emerald 
Uthwart reads, wondering, the solitary memorial of 
one soldierly member of his race, who had, — well ! 
who had not died here at home, in his bed. How 
wretched ! how fine ! how inconceivably great and difii- 
cult ! — not for him ! And yet, amid all its littleness, 
how large his sense of liberty in the place he, the 
cadet doomed to leave it — his birth-place, where he 
is also so early to die — had loved better than any one 
of them ! Enjoying hitherto all the freedom of the 
almost grown-up brothers, the unrepressed noise, the 
unchecked hours, the old rooms, all their own way, 
he is literally without the consciousness of rule. Only, 
when the long irresponsible day is over, amid the 
dew, the odours, of summer twilight, they roll their 



174 EMERALD UTHWART 

cricket-field against to-morrow's game. So it had 
always been with the Uthwarts ; they never went to 
school. In the great attic he has chosen for himself 
Emerald awakes ; — it was a rule, sanitary, almost medi- 
cal, never to rouse the children — rises to play betimes ; 
or, if he choose, with window flung open to the roses, 
the sea, turns to sleep again, deliberately, deliciously, 
under the fine old blankets. 

A rather sensuous boy ! you may suppose, amid the 
Avholesome, natural self-indulgence of a very English 
home. His days began there : it closed again, after 
an interval of the larger number of them, indulgently, 
mercifully, round his end. For a while he became 
its centre, old habits changing, the old furniture re- 
arranged about him, for the first time in many gen- 
erations, though he left it now with something like 
resentment in his heart, as if thrust harshly away, sent 
ablactatus a matre ; made an effort thereon to snap the 
last thread which bound him to it. Yet it would 
come back upon him sometimes, amid so different a 
scene, as through a suddenly opened door, or a rent 
in the wall, with softer thoughts of his people, — there, 
or not there, — and a sudden, dutiful effort on his 
part to rekindle wasting affection. 

The youngest of four sons, but not the youngest of 
the family ! — you conceive the sort of negligence that 
creeps over even the kindest maternities, in such case ; 
unless, perhaps, sickness, or the sort of misfortune, 
making the last first for the affectionate, that brought 
Emerald back at length to die contentedly, interferes 
with the way of nature. Little by little he comes to 



EMERALD UTHWART 175 

understand that, while the brothers are indulged with 
lessons at home, are some of them free even of these 
and placed already in the world, where, however, there 
remains no place for him, he is to go to school, chiefly 
for the convenience of others — they are going to be 
much away from home ! — that now for the first time, 
as he says to himself, an old-English Uthwart is to 
pass under the yoke. The tutor in the house, mean- 
time, aware of some fascination in the lad, teaches him, 
at his own irregularly chosen hours, more carefully 
than the others ; exerts all his gifts for the purpose, 
winning him on almost insensibly to youthful pro- 
ficiency in those difficult rudiments. See him as he 
stands, seemingly rooted in the spot where he has 
come to flower ! He departs, however, a few days 
before the departure of the rest — some to foreign 
parts, the brothers, who shut up the old place, to town. 
For a moment, he makes an eff'ort to figure to himself 
those coming absences as but exceptional intervals in 
his life here ; he will count the days, going more 
quickly so ; find his pleasure in watching the sands 
fall, as even the sands of time at school must. In 
fact, he was scarcely ever to lie at ease here again, till 
he came to take his final leave of it, lying at his length 
so. In brief holidays he rejoins his people, anywhere, 
anyhow, in a sort of hurry and makeshift: — Flos 
Parietis .' thus carelessly plucked forth. Emerald 
Uthwart was born on such a day " at Chase Lodge, 
in this parish, and died there." 

See him then as he stands ! counting now the hours 
that remain, on the eve of that first emigration, and 



176 EMERALD UTHWART 

look away next at the other place, which through 
centuries has been forming to receive him ; from those 
garden-beds, now at their richest, but where all is so 
winsomely little, to that "place of "great matters," 
great stones, great memories out of reach. Why ! the 
Uthwarts had scarcely had more memories than their 
woods, noiselessly deciduous; or their pre-historic, 
entirely unprogressive, unrecording forefathers, in or 
before the days of the Druids. Centuries of almost 
"still" life — of birth, death, and the rest, as merely 
natural processes — had made them and their home 
what we find them. Centuries of conscious endeavour, 
on the other hand, had builded, shaped, and coloured 
the place, a small cell, which Emerald Uthwart was 
now to occupy; a place such as our most charac- 
teristic English education has rightly tended to " find 
itself a house " in — a place full, for those who came 
within its influence, of a will of its own. Here every- 
thing, one's very games, have gone by rule onwards 
from the dim old monastic days, and the Benedictine 
school for novices with the wholesome severities which 
have descended to our own time. Like its customs, — 
there's a book in the cathedral archives with the 
names, for centuries past, of the " scholars " who have 
missed church at the proper times for going there — 
like its customs, well-worn yet well-preserved, time- 
stained, time-engrained, time-mellowed, the venerable 
Norman or English stones of this austere, beautifully 
proportioned place look like marble, to which Emer- 
ald's softly nurtured being, his careless wild-growth 
must now adapt itself, though somewhat painfully 



EMERALD UTHWART 177 

recoiling from contact with what seems so hard also, 
and bright, and cold. From his native world of soft 
garden touches, carnation and rose (they had been 
everywhere in those last weeks), where everyone did 
just what he liked, he was passed now to this world of 
grey stone ; and here it was always the decisive word 
of command. That old warrior Uthwart's record in 
the church at home, so fine, yet so wretched, so 
unspeakably great and difficult ! seemed written here 
everywhere around him, as he stood feeling himself 
fit only to be taught, to be drilled into, his small 
compartment ; in every movement of his companions, 
with their quaint confining little cloth gowns ; in the 
keen, clear, well-authorised dominancy of some, the 
instant submission of others. In fact, by one of our 
wise English compromises, we still teach our so 
modern boys the Classics ; a lesson in attention and 
patience, at the least. Nay ! by a double compromise, 
with delightful physiognomic results sometimes, we 
teach them their pagan Latin and Greek under the 
shadow of medieval church-towers, amid the haunts, 
the traditions, and with something of the discipline, 
of monasticism ; for which, as is noticeable, the English 
have never wholly lost an early inclination. The 
French and others have swept their scholastic houses 
empty of it, with pedantic fidelity to their theories. 
English pedants may succeed in doing the like. But 
the result of our older method has had its value so 
far, at least, say ! for the careful aesthetic observer. 
It is of such diagonal influences, through compHcation 
of influence, that expression comes, in life, in our 

N 



178 EMERALD UTHWART 

culture, in the very faces of men and boys — of these 
boys. Nothing could better harmonise present with 
past than the sight of them just here, as they shout 
at their games, or recite their lessons, over-arched by 
the work of medieval priors, or pass to church meekly, 
into the seats occupied by the young monks before 
them. 

If summer comes reluctantly to our English shores, 
it is also apt to linger with us ; — its fioj'a of red and 
gold leaves on the branches wellnigh to Christmas; 
the hot days that surprise you, and persist, though 
heralded by white mornings, hinting that it is but the 
year's indulgence so to deal with us. To the fanciful, 
such days may seem most at home in the places where 
England has thus preferred to locate the somewhat 
pensive education of its more favoured youth. As 
Uthwart passes through the old ecclesiastical city, 
upon which any more modern touch, modern door or 
window, seems a thing out of place through negligence, 
the diluted sunlight itself seems driven along with a 
sparing trace of gilded vane or red tile in it, under 
the wholesome active wind from the East coast. The 
long, finely weathered, leaden roof, and the great 
square tower, gravely magnificent, emphatic from the 
first view of it over the grey down above the hop-gar- 
dens, the gently-watered meadows, dwarf now every- 
thing beside ; have the bigness of nature's work, 
seated up there so steadily amid the winds, as rain 
and fog and heat pass by. More and more persis- 
tently, as he proceeds, in the " Green Court " at last, 
they occupy the outlook. He is shown the narrow 



EMERALD UTHWART 179 

cubicle in which he is to sleep ; and there it still is, 
with nothing else, in the window-pane, as he lies ; — 
" our tower," the "Angel Steeple," noblest of its kind. 
Here, from morning to night, everything seems chal- 
lenged to follow the upward lead of its long, bold, 
" perpendicular " lines. The very place one is in, its 
stone-work, its empty spaces, invade you ; invade all 
who belong to them, as Uthwart belongs, yielding 
wholly from the first ; seem to question you master- 
fully as to your purpose in being here at all, amid the 
great memories of the past, of this school ; — chal- 
lenge you, so to speak, to make moral philosophy one 
of your acquirements, if you can, and to systematise 
your vagrant self; which however will in any case be 
here systematised for you. In Uthwart, then, is the 
plain tablet, for the influences of place to inscribe. 
Say if you will, that he is under the power of an " em- 
bodied ideal," somewhat repellent, but which he can- 
not despise. He sits in the schoolroom — ancient, 
transformed chapel of the pilgrims ; sits in the sober 
white and brown place, at the heavy old desks, carved 
this way and that, crowded as an old churchyard with 
forgotten names, side by side with sympathetic or 
antipathetic competitors, as it may chance. In a 
delightful, exactly measured, quarter of an hour's rest, 
they come about him, seem to wish to be friends at 
once, good and bad alike, dull and clever ; wonder a 
little at the name, and the owner. A family name — 
he explains, good-humouredly ; tries to tell some story 
no one could ever remember precisely of the ancestor 
from whom it came, the one story of the Uthwarts ; is 



180 EMERALD UTHWART 

spared ; nay ! petulantly forbidden to proceed. But 
the name sticks the faster. Nicknames mark, for the 
most part, popularity. Emerald/ so every one called 
Uthwart, but shortened to Aldy. They disperse ; 
flock out into the court; acquaint him hastily with 
the curiosities of the Precincts, the " dark entry," the 
rich heraldries of the blackened and mouldering clois- 
ter, the ruined overgrown spaces where the old monas- 
tery stood, the stones of which furnished material for 
the rambling prebends' houses, now "antediluvian" in 
their turn ; are ready also to climb the scaffold-poles 
always to be found somewhere about the great church, 
or dive along the odd, secret passages of the old 
builders, with quite learned explanations (being proud 
of, and therefore painstaking about, the place) of 
architectural periods, of Gothic " late " and " early," 
layer upon layer, down to round-arched " Norman," 
like the famous staircase of their school. 

The reader comprehends that Uthwart was come 
where the genius loci was a strong one, with a claim to 
mould all who enter it to a perfect, uninquiring, willing 
or unwilling, conformity to itself. On Saturday half- 
holidays the scholars are taken to church in their sur- 
plices, across the court, under the Hme-trees ; emerge 
at last up the dark winding passages into the melo- 
dious, mellow-lighted space, always three days behind 
the temperature outside, so thick are the walls ; — 
how warm and nice ! how cool and nice ! The choir, 
to which they glide in order to their places below the 
clergy, seems conspicuously cold and sad. But the 
empty chapels lying beyond it all about into the dis- 



EMERALD UTHWART 181 

tance are a trap on sunny mornings for the clouds of 
yellow effulgence. The Angel Steeple is a lantern 
within, and sheds down a flood of the like just beyond 
the gates. You can peep up into it where you sit, if 
you dare to gaze about you. If at home there had 
been nothing great, here, to boyish sense, one seems 
diminished to nothing at all, amid the grand waves, 
wave upon wave, of patiently-wrought stone ; the dar- 
ing height, the daring severity, of the innumerable, 
long, upward, ruled lines, rigidly bent just at last, in 
due place, into the reserved grace of the perfect Gothic 
arch ; the peculiar daylight which seemed to come 
from further than the light outside. Next morning 
they are here again. In contrast to those irregularly 
broken hours at home, the passive length of things 
impresses Uthwart now. It develops patience — that 
tale of hours, the long chanted EngUsh service ; our 
English manner of education is a development of 
patience, of decorous and mannerly patience. " It is 
good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth : 
he putteth his mouth in the dust, he keepeth silence, 
because he hath borne it upon him." — They have 
this for an anthem ; sung however to wonderfully 
cheerful and sprightly music, as if one liked the 
thought. 

The aim of a veritable community, says Plato, is 
not that this or that member of it should be dispro- 
portionately at ease, but that the whole should flourish ; 
though indeed such general welfare might come round 
again to the loyal unit therein, and rest with him, as 
a privilege of his individual being after all. The 



182 EMERALD UTHWART 

social type he preferred, as we know, was conservative 
Sparta and its youth ; whose unsparing discipline 
had doubtless something to do with the fact that it 
was the handsomest and best-formed in all Greece. 
A school is not made for one. It would misrepresent 
Uthwart's wholly unconscious humility to say that 
he felt the beauty of the ao-K7;<ns (we need that Greek 
word) to which he not merely finds himself subject, 
but as under a fascination submissively yields him- 
self, although another might have been aware of the 
charm of it, half ethic, half physical, as visibly effective 
in him. Its peculiarity would have lain in the expres- 
sion of a stress upon him and his customary daily 
existence, beyond what any definitely proposed issue 
of it, at least for the moment, explained. Something 
of that is involved in the very idea of a classical 
education, at least for such as he ; in its seeming 
indirectness or lack of purpose, amid so much diffi- 
culty, as contrasted with forms of education more 
obviously useful or practical. He found himself in 
a system of fixed rules, amid which, it might be, some 
of his own tendencies and inclinations would die out 
of him through disuse. The confident word of com- 
mand, the instantaneous obedience expected, the en- 
forced silence, the very games that go by rule, a sort 
of hardness natural to wholesome English youths 
wheil they come together, but here de rigueur as a 
point of good manners ; — he accepts all these with- 
out hesitation ; the early hours also, naturally dis- 
tasteful to him, which gave to actual morning, to all 
that had passed in it, when in more self-conscious 



EMERALD UTHWART 183 

mood he looked back on the morning of Ufe, a pre- 
ponderance, a disproportionate place there, adding 
greatly to the ' effect of its dreamy distance from him 
at this later time ; — an ideal quaUty, he might have 
said, had he ever used such words as that. 

Uthwart duly passes his examination ; and, in their 
own chapel in the transept of the choir, lighted up 
late for evening prayer after the long day of trial, is 
received to the full privileges of a Scholar with the 
accustomed Latin words : — Introitum tuuni et exitunt 
tuum custodiat Dominus ! He takes them, not to 
heart, but rather to mind, as few, if they so much as 
heard them, were wont to do ; ponders them for a 
while. They seem scarcely meant for him — words 
like those ! increase however his sense of respon- 
sibiUty to the place, of which he is now more exclu- 
sively than before a part — that he belongs to it, its 
great memories, great dim purposes ; deepen the con- 
sciousness he had on first coming hither of a demand 
in the world about him, whereof the very stones are 
emphatic, to which no average human creature could 
be sufficient ; of reproof, reproaches, of this or that in 
himself. 

It was reported, there was a funny belief, at school, 
that Aldy Uthwart had no feeling and was incapable 
of tears. They never came to him certainly, when, at 
nights for the most part, the very touch of home, so 
soft, yet so indifferent to him, reached him, with 
a sudden opulent rush of garden perfumes ; came at 
the rattling of the window-pane in the wind, with any- 
thing that expressed distance from the bare white walls 



184 EMERALD UTHWART 

around him here. He thrust it from him brusquely, 
being of a practical turn, and, though somewhat 
sensuous, wholly without sentimentality. There is 
something however in the lad's soldier-like, impas- 
sible self-command, in his sustained expression of 
a certain indifference to things, which awakes sud- 
denly all the sentiment, the poetry, latent hitherto 
in another — James Stokes, the prefect, his immediate 
superior ; awakes for the first time into ample flower 
something of genius in a seemingly plodding scholar, 
and therewith also something of the waywardness popu- 
larly thought to belong to genius. Preceptores, condi- 
scipidi, alike, marvel at a sort of delicacy coming into 
the habits, the person, of that tall, bashful, broad-shoul- 
dered, very Kentish, lad ; so unaffectedly nevertheless, 
that it is understood after all to be but the smartness 
properly significant of change to early manhood, like 
the down on his lip. Wistful anticipations of man- 
hood are in fact aroused in him, thoughts of the future ; 
his ambition takes effective outline. The well-worn, 
perhaps conventional, beauties of their " dead " Greek 
and Latin books, associated directly now with the 
living companion beside him, really shine for him at 
last with their pristine freshness ; seem more than to 
fulfil their claim upon the patience, the attention, of 
modern youth. He notices as never before minute 
points of meaning in Homer, in Virgil ; points out 
thus, for instance, to his junior, one day in the sun- 
shine, how the Greeks had a special word for the Fate 
which accompanied one who would come to a violent 
end. The common Destinies of men, Molpai, Mcera 



EMERALD UTHWART 185 

— they accompanied all men indifferently. But Ki^p, 
the extraordinary Destiny, one's Doom, had a scent 
for distant blood-shedding; and, to be in at a san- 
guinary death, one of their number came forth to the 
very cradle, followed persistently all the way, over the 
waves, through powder and shot, through the rose- 
gardens; — where not? Looking back, one might 
trace the red footsteps all along, side by side. (Emer- 
ald Uthwart, you remember, was to " die there," of 
lingering sickness, in disgrace, as he fancied, while the 
word glory came to be softly whispered of them and 
of their end.) Classic felicities, the choice expressions, 
with which James Stokes has so patiently stored his 
memory, furnish now a dainty embroidery upon every 
act, every change in time or place, of their daily life 
in common. He finds the Greek or the Latin model 
of their antique friendship or tries to find it, in the 
books they read together. None fits exactly. It is 
of military glory they are really thinking, amid those 
ecclesiastical surroundings, where however surplices 
and uniforms are often mingled together; how they 
will lie, in costly glory, costly to them, side by side, 
(as they work and walk and play now, side by side) 
in the cathedral aisle, with a tattered flag perhaps 
above them, and under a single epitaph, like that of 
those two older scholars. Ensigns, Signiferi, in their 
respective regiments, in hac ecdesid pueri instituti, with 
the sapphic stanza in imitation of the Horace they 
had learned here, written by their old master. 

Horace ! — he was, had been always, the idol of 
their school ; to know him by heart, to translate him 



186 EMERALD UTHWART 

into effective English idiom, have an apt phrase of his 
instinctively on one's lips for every occasion. That 
boys should be made to spout him under penalties, 
would have seemed doubtless to that sensitive, vain, 
winsome poet, even more than to grim Juvenal, quite 
the sorriest of fates ; might have seemed not so bad 
however, could he, from the "ashes" so persistently 
in his thoughts, have peeped on these English boys, 
row upon row, with black or golden heads, repeating 
him in the fresh morning, and observed how well for 
once the thing was done ; how well he was understood 
by English James Stokes, feeling the old "fire" really 
" quick " still, under the influence which now in truth 
quickened, enlivened, everything around him. The 
old heathen's way of looking at things, his melodious 
expression of it, blends, or contrasts itself oddly with 
the everyday detail, with the very stones, the Gothic 
stones, of a world he could hardly have conceived, 
its medieval surroundings, their half-clerical life 
here. Yet not so inconsistently after all ! The 
builders of these aisles and cloisters had known 
and valued as much of him as they could come by 
in their own un-instructed time ; had built up their 
intellectual edifice more than they were aware of from 
fragments of pagan thought, as, quite consciously, they 
constructed their churches of old Roman bricks and 
pillars, or frank imitations of them. One's day, then, 
began with him, for all alike, Sundays of course ex- 
cepted, — with an Ode, learned over-night by the 
prudent, who, observing how readily the words which 
send us to sleep cling to the brain and seem an inhe- 



EMERALD UTHWART 187 

lent part of it next morning, kept him under their 
pillows. Prefects, without a book, heard the repeti- 
tion of the Juniors, must be able to correct their 
blunders. Odes and Epodes, thus acquired, were a 
score of days and weeks ; alcaic and sapphic verses 
like a bead-roll for counting off the time that inter- 
vened before the holidays. Time — that tardy servant 
of youthful appetite — brought them soon enough to 
the point where they desired in vain " to see one of " 
those days, erased now so willingly ; and sentimental 
James Stokes has already a sense that this "pause 
'twixt cup and lip " of life is really worth pausing 
over, worth deliberation : — all this poetry, yes ! poetry, 
surely, of their alternate work and play; light and 
shade, call it ! Had it been, after all, a Hfe in itself 
less commonplace than theirs — that life, the trivial 
details of which their Horace had touched so daintily, 
gilded with real gold words ? 

Regular, submissive, dutiful to play also, Aldy 
meantime enjoys his triumphs in the Green Court ; 
loves best however to run a paper-chase afar over 
the marshes, till you come in sight, or within scent, 
of the sea, in the autumn twilight ; and his dutifulness 
to games at least had its full reward. A wonderful 
hit of his at cricket was long remembered ; right over 
the lime-trees on to the cathedral roof, was it? or over 
the roof, and onward into space, circling there inde- 
pendently, minutely, as Sidtis Cantiormn? A comic 
poem on it in Latin, and a pretty one in English, were 
penned by James Stokes, still not so serious but that 
he forgets time altogether one day, in a manner the 



188 EMERALD UTHWART 

converse of exemplary in a prefect, whereupon Uthwart, 
his companion as usual, manages to take all the blame, 
and the due penalty next morning. Stokes accepted 
the sacrifice the more readily, believing — he too — 
that Aldy was " incapable of pain." What surprised 
those who were in the secret was that, when it was 
over, he rose, and facing the headmaster — could it be 
insolence ? or was it the sense of untruthfulness in his 
friendly action, or sense of the universal peccancy of 
all boys and men ? — said submissively : " And now, sir, 
that I have taken my punishment, I hope you will 
forgive my fault." 

Submissiveness ! — It had the force of genius with 
Emerald Uthwart. In that very matter he had but 
yielded to a senior against his own inclination. What 
he felt in Horace was the sense, original, active, 
personal, of " things too high for me! ", the sense, not 
really unpleasing to him, of an unattainable height 
here too, in this royal felicity of utterance, this literary 
art, the minute cares of which had been really designed 
for the minute carefulness of a disciple such as this — 
all attention. Well ! the sense of authority, of a large 
intellectual authority over us, impressed anew day after 
day, of some impenetrable glory round " the masters 
of those who know," is, of course, one of the effects we 
look for from a classical education : — that, and a full 
estimate of the preponderating value of the manner 
of the doing of it in the thing done ; which again, for 
ingenuous youth, is an encouragement of good manners 
on its part: — "I behave myself orderly." Just at 
those points, scholarship attains something of a relig- 



EMERALD UTHWART 189 

ious colour. And in that place, religion, religions 
system, its claim to overpower one, presented itself 
in a way of which even the least serious by nature 
could not be unaware. Their great church, its customs 
and traditions, formed an element in that esprit de corps 
into which the boyish mind throws itself so readily. 
Afterwards, in very different scenes, the sentiment of 
that place would come back upon him, as if resentfully, 
by contrast with the conscious or unconscious pro- 
fanities of others, crushed out about him straightway, 
by the shadow of awe, the minatory flash, felt around 
his unopened lips, in the glance, the changed manner. 
Not to be " occupied with great matters " recommends 
in heavenly places, as we know, the souls of some. 
Yet there were a few to whom it seemed unfortunate 
that religion whose flag Uthwart would have borne in 
hands so pure, touched him from first to last, and till 
his eyes were finally closed on this world, only, again, 
as a thing immeasurable, surely not meant for the like 
of him j its high claims, to which no one could be 
equal ; its reproaches. He would scarcely have pro- 
posed to " enter into " such matters ; was constitu- 
tionally shy of them. His submissiveness, you see, 
was a kind of genius j made him therefore, of course, 
unlike those around him ; was a secret ; a thing, you 
might say, "which no one knoweth, saving he that 
receiveth it." 

Thus repressible, self-restrained, always concurring 
with the influence, the claim upon him, the rebuke, of 
others, in the bustle of school life he did not count 
even with those who knew him best, with those who 



190 EMERALD UTHWART 

taught him, for the intellectual capacity he really had. 
In every generation of schoolboys there are a few who 
find out, almost for themselves, the beauty and power 
of good literature, even in the literature they must 
read perforce ; and this, in turn, is but the handsel of 
a beauty and power still active in the actual world, 
should they have the good fortune, or rather, acquire 
the skill, to deal with it properly. It has something 
of the stir and unction — this intellectual awaking with 
a leap — of the coming of love. So it was with Uthwart 
about his seventeenth year. He felt it, felt the intel- 
lectual passion, like the pressure outward of wings within 
him — rj TTTcpov Swafits, says Plato, in the Phcedrus ; 
but again, as some do with everyday love, withheld, 
restrained himself; the status of a freeman in the 
world of intellect can hardly be for him. The sense 
of intellectual ambition, ambitious thoughts such as 
sweeten the toil of some of those about him, coming to 
him once in a way, he is frankly recommended to put 
them aside, and acquiesces ; puts them from him once 
for all, as he could do with besetting thoughts and 
feelings, his preferences, (as he had put aside soft 
thoughts of home as a disobedience to rule) and with 
a countenance more good-humoured than ever, an 
absolute placidity. It is fit he should be treated 
sparingly in this matter of intellectual enjoyment. 
He is made to understand that there is at least a 
score of others as good scholars as he. He will have 
of course all the pains, but must not expect the prizes, 
of his work ; of his loyal, incessant, cheerful industry. 
But only see him as he goes. It is as if he left 



EMER.\LD UTHWART 191 

music, delightfully throbbing music, or flowers, behind 
him, as he passes, careless of them, unconsciously, 
through the world, the school, the precincts, the old 
city. Strangers' eyes, resting on him by chance, are 
deterred for a while, even among the rich sights of the 
venerable place, as he walks out and in, in his prim 
gown and purple-tasselled cap ; goes in, with the 
stream of sunlight, through the black shadows of the 
mouldering Gothic gateway, like youth's very self, 
eternal, immemorial, eternally renewed, about those 
immemorially ancient stones. " Young Apollo ! " peo- 
ple say — people who have pigeon-holes for their impres- 
sions, watching the slim, trim figure with the exercise 
books. His very dress seems touched with Hellenic 
fitness to the healthy youthful form. "Golden- 
haired, scholar Apollo ! " they repeat, foolishly, 
ignorantly. He was better ; was more like a real por- 
trait of a real young Greek, like Ttyphoii, So?i of Euty- 
chos, for instance, (as friends remembered him with 
regret, as you may see him still on his tombstone in the 
British Museum) alive among the paler physical and 
intellectual lights of modern England, under the old 
monastic stonework of the Middle Age. That theatri- 
cal old Greek god never took the expressiveness, the 
Unes of delicate meaning, such as were come into the 
face of the English lad, the physiognomy of his race ; 
ennobled now, as if by the writing, the signature, there, 
of a grave intelligence, by grave information and a sub- 
dued will, though without a touch of melancholy in 
this " best of playfellows." A musical composer's 
notes, we know, are not themselves till the fit executant 



192 EMERALD UTHWART 

comes, who can put all they may be into them. The 
somewhat unmeaningly handsome facial type of the 
Uthwarts, moulded to a mere animal or physical per- 
fection through wholesome centuries, is breathed on 
now, informed, by the touches, traces, complex influ- 
ences from past and present a thousandfold, crossing 
each other in this late century, and yet at unity in the 
simple law of the system to which he is now subject. 
Coming thus upon an otherwise vigorous and healthy 
nature, an untainted physique, and limited by it, those 
combining mental influences leave the firm unconscious 
simplicity of the boyish nature still unperplexed. The 
sisters, their friends, when he comes rarely upon them 
in foreign places, are proud of the schoolboy's com- 
pany — to walk at his side ; the brothers, when he sees 
them for a day, more considerate than of old. Every- 
where he leaves behind him an odd regret for his 
presence, as he in turn wonders sometimes at the 
deference paid to one so unimportant as himself by 
those he meets by accident perhaps ; at the ease, for 
example, with which he attains to the social privileges 
denied to others. 

They tell him, he knows it already, he would " do 
for the army." " Yes ! that would suit you," people 
observe at once, when he tells them what " he is to 
be" — undoubtedly suit him, that dainty, military, 
very English kind of pride, in seeming precisely what 
one is, neither more nor less. And the first mention 
of Uthwart's purpose defines also the vague outlooks 
of James Stokes, who will be a soldier too. Uniforms, 
their scarlet and white and blue, spruce leather and 



EMERALD UTHWART 193 

Steel, and gold lace, enlivening the old oak stalls at 
service time — uniforms and surplices were always 
close together here, where a military garrison had 
been established in the suburbs for centuries past, and 
there were always sons of its officers in the school. If 
you stole out of an evening, it was like a stage scene — 
nay ! like the Middle Age, itself, with this multitude 
of soldiers mingling in the crowd which filled the un- 
changed, gabled streets. A military tradition had 
been continuous, from the days of crusading knights 
who lay humbly on their backs in the "Warriors' 
Chapel " to the time of the civil wars, when a certain 
heroic youth of eighteen was brought to rest there, 
onward to Dutch and American wars, and to Harry, 
and Geoffrey, and another James also, in hac ecclesid 
pueri institutL It was not so long since one of them 
sat on those very benches in the sixth form ; had 
come back and entered the school, in full uniform, 
to say good-bye! Then the "colours" of his regi- 
ment had been brought, to be deposited by Dean 
and Canons in the cathedral ; and a few weeks later 
they had passed, scholars and the rest in long proces- 
sion, to deposit Ensign himself there under his 

flag, or what remained of it, a sorry, tattered fringe, 
along the staff he had borne out of the battle at the 
cost of his life, as a little tablet explained. There 
were others in similar terms. Alas ! for that extraor- 
dinary, peculiarly-named. Destiny, or Doom, ap- 
pointed to walk side by side with one or another, 
aware from the first, but never warning him, till the 
random or well-considered shot comes. 



194 EMERALD UTHWART 

Meantime however, the University, with work in 
preparation thereto, fills up the thoughts, the hours, 
of these would-be soldiers, of James Stokes, and there- 
fore of Emerald Uthwart, through the long summer- 
time, till the Green Court is fragrant with lime-blossom, 
and speech-day comes, on which, after their flower- 
service and sermon from an old comrade, Emerald 
surprises masters and companions by the fine quality 
of a recitation; still more when "Scholar Stokes" 
and he are found bracketed together as "Victors" of 
the school, who v/ill proceed together to Oxford. His 
speech in the Chapter-house was from that place in 
Homer, where the soul of the lad Elpenor, killed by 
accident, entreats Ulysses for due burial rites. " Fix 
my oar over my grave," he says, " the oar I rowed 
with when I lived, when I went with my companions." 
And in effect what surprised, charmed the hearers 
was the scruple with which those naturally graceful 
lips dealt with every word, every syllable, put upon 
them. He seemed to be thinking only of his authoi-, 
except for just so much of self-consciousness as was 
involved in the fact that he seemed also to be speak- 
ing a little against his will ; like a monk, it might be 
said, who sings in choir with a really fine voice, but at 
the bidding of his superior, and counting the notes 
all the while till his task be done, because his whole 
nature revolts from so much as the bare opportunity 
for personal display. It was his duty to speak on the 
occasion. They had always been great in speech- 
making, in theatricals, from before the days when the 
Puritans destroyed the Dean's "Great Hall" because 



EMERALD UTHWART 195 

"the King's Scholars had profaned it by acting plays 
there"; and that peculiar note or accent, as being 
conspicuously free from the egotism which vulgarises 
most of us, seemed to befit the person of Emerald, 
impressing weary listeners pleasantly as a novelty in 
that kind. Singular ! — The words, because seemingly 
forced from him, had been worth hearing. The cheers, 
the "Kentish Fire," of their companions might have 
broken down the crumbling black arches of the old 
cloister, or roused the dead under foot, as the "Victors " 
■came out of the Chapter-house side by side ; side by 
side also out of that delightful period of their life at 
school, to proceed in due course to the University. 

They left it precipitately, after brief residence there, 
taking advantage of a sudden outbreak of war to join 
the army at once, regretted — James Stokes for his 
high academic promise, Uthwart for a quality, or 
group of qualities, not strictly to be defined. He 
seemed, in short, to harmonise by their combination 
in himself all the various qualities proper to a large 
and varied community of youths of nineteen or twenty, 
to v/hich, when actually present there, he was felt from 
hour to hour to be indispensable. In fact school 
habits and standards had survived in a world not so 
different from that of school for those who are faithful 
to its type. When he looked back upon it a little 
later, college seemed to him, seemed indeed at the 
time, had he ventured to admit it, a strange pro- 
longation of boyhood, in its provisional character, the 
narrow limitation of its duties and responsibility, the 
very divisions of one's day, the routine of play and 



196 EMERALD UTHWART 

work, its formal, perhaps pedantic rules. The veri- 
table plunge from youth into manhood came when one 
passed finally through those old Gothic gates, from 
a somewhat dreamy or problematic preparation for 
it, into the world of peremptory facts. A college, like 
a school, is not made for one ; and as Uthwart sat 
there, still but a scholar, still reading with care the 
books prescribed for him by others — Greek and Latin 
books — the contrast between his own position and 
that of the majority of his coevals already at the 
business of life impressed itself sometimes with an 
odd sense of unreality in the place around him. Yet 
the schoolboy's sensitive awe for the great things of 
the intellectual world had but matured itself, and was 
at its height here amid this larger competition, which 
left him more than ever to find in doing his best 
submissively the sole reward of so doing. He needs 
now in fact less repression than encouragement not 
to be a " passman," as he may if he likes, acquiescing 
in a lowly measure of culture which certainly will not 
manufacture Miltons, nor turn serge into silk, broom- 
blossom into verbenas, but only, perhaps not so 
faultily, leave Emerald Uthwart and the like of him 
essentially what they are. " He holds his book in 
a peculiar way ; " notes in manuscript one of his tutors 
" holds on to it with both hands ; clings as if from 
below, just as his tough little mind clings to the 
sense of the Greek words he can English so closely, 
precisely." Again, as at school, he had put his neck 
under the yoke ; though he has now also much read- 
ing quite at his own choice ; by preference, when he 



EMERALD UTHWART 197 

can come by such, about the place where he finds 
himself, about the earlier youthful occupants, if it 
might be, of his own quaint rooms on the second 
floor just below the roof; of what he can see from 
his windows in the old black front eastwards, with 
its inestimable patina of ancient smoke and weather 
and natural decay (when you look close the very stone 
is a composite of minute dead bodies) relieving heads 
hke his so effectively on summer mornings. On 
summer nights the scent of the hay, the wild-flowers, 
comes across the narrow fringe of town to right and 
left ; seems to come from beyond the Oxford meadows, 
with sensitive, half-repellent thoughts from the gardens 
at home. He looks down upon the green square with 
the slim, quaint, black, young figures that cross it on 
the way to chapel on yellow Sunday mornings, or 
upwards to the dome, the spire ; can watch them 
closely in freakish moonlight, or flickering softly by 
an occasional bonfire in the quadrangle behind him. 
Yet how hard, how forbidding sometimes, under a late 
stormy sky, the scheme of black, white, and grey, 
to which the group of ancient buildings could attune 
itself. And what he reads most readily is of the 
military life that intruded itself so oddly, during 
the Civil War, into these half-monastic places, till the 
timid old academic world scarcely knew itself. He 
treasures then every incident which connects a sol- 
dier's coat with any still recognisable object, wall, 
or tree, or garden-walk ; that walk, for instance, under 
Merton garden where young Colonel Windebank was 
shot for a traitor. His body lies in Saint Mary 



198 EMER.\LD UTHWART 

Magdalen's churchyard, Unassociated to such in- 
cident, the mere beauties of the place counted at the 
moment for less than in retrospect. It was almost 
retrospect even now, with an anticipation of regret, 
in rare moments of solitude perhaps, when the oars 
splashed far up the narrow streamlets through the 
fields on May evenings among the fritillaries — does 
the reader know them? that strange remnant just 
here of a richer extinct flora — dry flowers, though 
with a drop of dubious honey in each. Snakes' heads, 
the rude call them, for their shape, scale-marked too, 
and in colour like rusted blood, as if they grew from 
some forgotten battle-field, the bodies, the rotten 
armour — yet delicate, beautiful, waving proudly. In 
truth the memory of Oxford made almost everything 
he saw after it seem vulgar. But he feels also never- 
theless, characteristically, that such local pride {fastus 
he terms it) is proper only for those whose occupationrs 
are wholly congruous with it ; for the gifted, the 
freemen who can enter into the genius, who possess 
the liberty, of the place ; that it has a reproach in 
it for the outsider, which comes home to him. 

Here again then as he passes through the world, 
so delightfully to others, they tell him, as if weighing 
him, his very self, against his merely scholastic capacity 
and effects, that he would " do for the army " ; which 
he is now wholly glad to hear, for from first to last, 
through all his successes there, the army had still been 
scholar Stokes' choice, and he had no difficulty, as 
the reader sees, in keeping Uthwart also faithful to 
first intentions. Their names were already entered 



EMERALD UTHWART 199 

for commissions ; but the war breaking out afresh, in- 
formation reaches them suddenly one morning that 
they may join their regiment forthwith. Bidding good- 
bye therefore, gladly, hastily, they set out with as little 
delay as possible for Flanders ; and passing the old 
school by their nearest road thither, stay for an hour, 
find an excuse for coming into the hall in uniform, 
with which it must be confessed they seem thoroughly 
satisfied — Uthwart quite perversely at ease in the 
stiff make of his scarlet jacket with black facings — 
and so pass onward on their way to Dover, Dunkirk, 
they scarcely know whither finally, among the feature- 
less villages, the long monotonous lines of the wind- 
mills, the poplars, blurred with cold fogs, but marking 
the roads through the snow which covers the endless 
plain, till they come in sight at last of the army in 
motion, like machines moving — how little it looked 
on that endless plain ! — pass on their rapid way to 
fame, to unpurchased promotion, as a matter of course 
to responsibility also, till, their fortune turning upon 
them, they miscarry in the latter fatally. They joined 
in fact a distinguished regiment in a gallant army, im- 
mediately after a victory in those Flemish regions; 
shared its encouragement as fully as if they had had a 
share in its perils ; the high character of the young 
officers consolidating itself easily, pleasantly for them, 
till the hour of an act of thoughtless bravery, almost 
the sole irregular or undisciplined act of Uthwart's 
life, he still following his senior — criminal however 
to the military conscience, under the actual circum- 
stances, and in an enemy's country. The faulty thing 



200 EMERALD UTHWART 

was done, certainly, with a scrupulous, a characteristic 
completeness on their part ; and with their prize actu- 
ally in hand, an old weather-beaten flag such as hung 
in the cathedral aisle at school, they bethought them 
for the first time of its price, with misgivings now in 
rapid growth, as they return to their posts as nearly as 
may be, for the division has been ordered forward in 
their brief absence, to find themselves under arrest, 
with that damning proof of heroism, of guilt, in their 
possession, relinquished however along with the swords 
they will never handle again — toys, idolised toys of 
our later youth, we weep at the thought of them as 
never to be handled again ! — as they enter the prison 
to await summary trial next day on the charge of 
wantonly deserting their posts while in position of 
high trust in time of war. 

The full details of what had happened could have 
been told only by one or other of themselves; by 
Uthwart best, in the somewhat matter-of-fact and 
prosaic journal he had managed to keep from the 
first, noting there the incidents of each successive 
day, as if in anticipation of its possible service by way 
of piece justificative, should such become necessary, 
attesting hour by hour their single-hearted devotion 
to soldierly duty. Had a draughtsman equally truth- 
ful or equally " reaUstic," as we say, accompanied 
them and made a like use of his pencil, he might have 
been mistaken at home for an artist aiming at " effect," 
by skilful " arrangements " to tickle people's interest 
in the spectacle of war — the sudden ruin of a village 
street, the heap of bleeding horses in the half-ploughed 



EMERALD UTHWART 201 

"field, the gaping bridges, hand or face of the dead 
peeping from a hastily made grave at the roadside, 
smoke-stained rents in cottage-walls, ignoble ruin 
everywhere — ignoble but for its frank expression. 

But you find in Uthwart's journal, side by side 
with those ugly patches, very precise and unadorned 
records of their common gallantry, the more effective 
indeed for their simplicity ; and not of gallantry 
only, but of the long-sustained patience also, the 
essential monotony of military life, even on a cam- 
paign. Peril, good-luck, promotion, the grotesque 
hardships which leave them smart as ever, (as if, so 
others observe, dust and mire wouldn't hold on them, 
so "spick and span" they were, more especially on 
days of any exceptional risk or effort) the great con- 
fidence reposed in them at last; all is noted, till, 
with a little quiet pride, he records a gun-shot wound 
which keeps him a month alone in hospital wearily ; 
and at last, its hasty but seemingly complete healing. 

Following, leading, resting sometimes perforce, amid 
gun-shots, putrefying wounds, green corpses, they 
never lacked good spirits, any more than the birds 
warbling perennially afresh, as they will, over such 
gangrened places, or the grass which so soon covers 
them. And at length fortune, their misfortune, per- 
versely determined that heroism should take the form 
of patience under the walls of an unimportant frontier 
town, with old Vauban fortifications seemingly made 
only for appearance' sake, like the work in the trenches 
— gardener's work ! round about the walls they are 
called upon to superintend day after day. It was like 



202 EMERALD UTHWART 

a calm at sea, delaying one's passage, one's purpose 
in being on board at all, a dead calm, yet with an 
awful feeling of tension, intolerable at last for those 
who were still all athirst for action. How dumb and 
stupid the place seemed, in its useless defiance of 
conquerors, anxious, for reasons not indeed apparent, 
but which they were undoubtedly within their rights 
in holding to, not to blow it at once into the air — the 
steeple, the perky weathercock — to James Stokes in 
particular, always eloquent in action, longing for 
heroic effort, and ready to pay its price, maddened 
now by the palpable imposture in front of him morn- 
ing after morning, as he demonstrates conclusively 
to Uthwart, seduced at last from the clearer sense 
of duty and disciphne, not by the demonstrated ease, 
but rather by the apparent difficulty of what Stokes 
proposes to do. They might have been deterred by 

recent example. Colonel , who, as every one 

knew, had actually gained a victory by disobeying 
orders, had not been suffered to remain in the army 
of which he was an ornament. It was easy in fact 
for both, though it seemed the heroic thing, to dash 
through the calm with delightful sense of active 
powers renewed; to pass into the beleaguered town 
with a handful of men, and no loss, after a manner 
the feasibility of which Stokes had explained acutely 
but in vain at headquarters. He proved it to Uthwart 
at all events, and a few others. Delightful heroism ! 
delightful self-indulgence ! It was delayed for a mo- 
ment by orders to move forward at last, with hopes 
checked almost immediately after by a countermand, 



EMERALD UTHWART 203 

bringing them right round their stupid dumb enemy 
to the same wearisome position once again, to the 
trenches and the rest, but with their thirst for action 
only stimulated the more. How great the disappoint- 
ment ! encouraging a certain laxity of discipline that 
had prevailed about them of late. They take advan- 
tage however of a vague phrase in their instructions ; 
determine in haste to proceed on their plan as care- 
fully, as sparingly of the lives of others as may be ; 
detach a small company, hazarding thereby an alge- 
braically certain scheme at headquarters of victory 
or secure retreat, which embraced the entire country 
in its calculations ; detach themselves ; finally pass 
into the place, and out again with their prize, them- 
selves secure. Themselves only could have told the 
details — the intensely pleasant, the glorious sense of 
movement renewed once more ; of defiance, just for 
once, of a seemingly stupid control ; their dismay at 
finding their company led forward by others, their 
own posts deserted, their handful of men — nowhere ! 
In an ordinary trial at law, the motives, every detail 
of so irregular an act might have been weighed, 
changing the colour of it. Their general character 
would have told in their favour, but actually told 
against them now ; they had but won an exceptional 
trust to betray it. Martial courts exist not for con- 
sideration, but for vivid exemplary effect and prompt 
punishment. " There is a kind of tribunal incidental 
to service in the field," writes another diarist, who 
may tell in his own words what remains to be told. 
" This court,*' he says, " may consist of three staff- 



204 EMERALD UTHWART 

officers only, but has the power of sentencing to 
death. On the — st two young officers of the — th 
regiment, in whom it appears unusual confidence had 
been placed, were brought before this court, on the 
charge of desertion and wantonly exposing their 
company to danger. They were found guilty, and 
the proper penalty death, to be inflicted next morning 
before the regiment marches. The delinquents were 
understood to have appealed to a general court- 
martial ; desperately at last, to ' the judgment of 
their country ' ; but were held to have no locus standi 
whatever for an appeal under the actual circum- 
stances. As a civilian I cannot but doubt the justice, 
whatever may be thought of the expediency, of such 
a summary process in regard to the capital penalty. 
The regiment to which the culprits belonged, with 
some others, was quartered for the night in \}l\& fau- 
bourg of Saint , recently under blockade by a 

portion of our forces. I was awoke at daybreak 
by the sound of marching. The morning was a par- 
ticularly clear one, though, as the sun was not yet 
risen, it looked grey and sad along the empty street, 
up which a party of grey soldiers were passing with 
steady pace. I knew for what purpose. 

"The whole of the force in garrison here had 
already marched to the place of execution, the im- 
mense courtyard of a monastery, surrounded irregu- 
larly by ancient buildings like those of some cathedral 
precincts I have seen in England. Here the soldiers 
then formed three sides of a great square, a grave 
having been dug on the fourth side. Shortly after- 



EMERALD UTHWART 205 

wards the funeral procession came up. First came 
the band of the — th, playing the Dead March ; 
next the firing party, consisting of twelve non- 
commissioned officers ; then the coffins, followed im- 
mediately by the unfortunate prisoners, accompanied 
by a chaplain. Slowly and sadly did the mournful 
procession approach, when it passed through three 
sides of the square, the troops having been pre- 
viously faced inwards, and then halted opposite to 
the grave. The proceedings of the court-martial 
were then read ; and the elder prisoner having been 
bhndfolded was ordered to kneel down on his coffin, 
which had been placed close to the grave, the firing 
party taking up a position exactly opposite at a few 
yards' distance. The poor fellow's face was deadly 
pale, but he had marched his last march as steadily 
as ever I saw a man step, and bore himself throughout 
most bravely, though an oddly mixed expression 
passed over his countenance when he was directed 
to remove himself from the side of his companion, 
shaking his hand first. At this moment there was 
hardly a dry eye, and several young soldiers fainted, 
numberless as must be the scenes of horror which 
even they have witnessed during these last months. 
At length the chaplain, who had remained praying 
with the prisoner, quietly withdrew, and at a given 
signal, but without word of command, the muskets 
were levelled, a volley was fired, and the body of 
the unfortunate man sprang up, falHng again on his 
back. One shot had purposely been reserved ; and 
as the presiding officer thought he was not quite dead 



206 EMERALD UTHWART 

a musket was placed close to his head and fired. All 
was now over; but the troops having been formed 
into columns were marched close by the body as it 
lay on the ground, after which it was placed in one of 
the coffins and buried. 

" I had almost forgotten his companion, the younger 
and more fortunate prisoner, though I could scarcely 
tell, as I looked at him, whether his fate was really 
preferable in leaving his own rough coffin unoccupied 
behind him there. Lieutenant (I think Edward) 
Uthwart, as being the younger of the two offenders, 
' by the mercy of the court ' had his sentence com- 
muted to dismissal from the army with disgrace. 
A colour-sergeant then advanced with the former 
officer's sword, a remarkably fine one, which he there- 
upon snapped in sunder over the prisoner's head as he 
knelt. After this the prisoner's regimental coat was 
handed forward and put upon him, the epaulettes and 
buttons being then torn off and flung to a distance. 
This part of such sentences is almost invariably spared ; 
but, I suppose through unavoidable haste, was on the 
present occasion somewhat rudely carried out. I shall 
never forget the expression of this man's countenance, 
though I have seen many sad things in the course of 
my profession. He had the sort of good looks which 
always rivet attention, and in most minds friendly 
interest ; and now, amid all his pain and bewilder- 
ment, bore a look of humility and submission as he 
underwent those extraordinary details of his punish- 
ment, which touched me very oddly with a sort of 
desire (I cannot otherwise express it) to share his lot, 



EMERALD UTHWART 207 

to be actually in his place for a moment. Yet, alas ! — 
no ! say rather Thank Heaven ! the nearest approach 
to that look I have seen has been on the face of those 
whom I have known from circumstances to be almost 
incapable at the time of any feeling whatever. 
I would have offered him pecuniary aid, supposing 
he needed it, but it was impossible. I went on with 
the regiment, leaving the poor wretch to shift for 
himself. Heaven knows how, the state of the country 
being what it is. He might join the enemy ! " 
« What money Uthwart had about him had in fact 
passed that morning into the hands of his guards. 
To tell what followed would be to accompany him 
on a roundabout and really aimless journey, the details 
of which he could never afterwards recall. See him 
lingering for morsels of food at some shattered farm- 
stead, or assisted by others almost as wretched as 
himself, sometimes without his asking. In his worn 
military dress he seems a part of the ruin under which 
he creeps for a night's rest as darkness comes on. He 
actually came round again to the scene of his disgrace, 
of the execution ; looked in vain for the precise spot 
where he had knelt ; then, almost envying him who 
lay there, for the unmarked , grave ; passed over it 
perhaps unrecognised for some change in that terrible 
place, or rather in himself j wept then as never before 
in his life j dragged himself on once more, till suddenly 
the whole country seems to move under the rumour, 
the very thunder, of " the crowning victory," as he is 
made to understand. Falling in with the tide of its 
heroes returning to English shores, his vagrant foot- 



208 EMERALD UTHWART 

steps are at last directed homewards. He finds him- 
self one afternoon at the gate, turning out of the quiet 
Sussex road, through the fields for whose safety he 
had fought with so much of undeniable gallantry and 
approval. 

On that July afternoon the gardens, the woods, 
mounted in flawless sweetness all round him as he 
stood, to meet the circle of a flawless sky. Not 
a cloud ; not a motion on the grass ! At the first 
he had intended to return home no more ; and it had 
been a proof of his great dejection that he sent at last, 
as best he could, for money. They knew his fate 
already by report, and were touched naturally when 
that had followed on the record of his honours. Had 
it been possible they would have set forth at any risk 
to meet, to seek him ; were waiting now for the weary 
one to come to the gate, ready with their oil and wine, 
to speak metaphorically, and from this time forth 
underwent his charm to the utmost — the charm of an 
exquisite character, felt in some way to be inseparable 
from his person, his characteristic movements, touched 
also now with seemingly irreparable sorrow. For his 
part, drinking in here the last sweets of the sensible 
world, it was as if he, the lover of roses, had never 
before been aware of them at all. The original soft- 
ness of his temperament, against which the sense of 
greater things thrust upon him had successfully re- 
acted, asserted itself again now as he lay at ease, the 
ease well merited by his deeds, his sorrows. That 
he was going to die moved those about him to humour 
this mood, to soften all things to his touch ; and look- 



EMERALD UTHWART 209 

ing back he might have pronounced those four last 
years of doom the happiest of his Hfe. The memory 
of the grave into which he had gazed so steadily on 
the execution morning, into which, as he feels, one 
half of himself had then descended, does not lessen his 
shrinking from the fate before him, yet fortifies him 
to face it manfully, gives a sort of fraternal familiarity 
to death ; in a few weeks' time this battle too is 
fought out ; it is as if the thing were ended. The 
delightful summer heat, the freshness it enhances — he 
contrasts such things no longer with the sort of place 
to which he is hastening. The possible duration of 
life for him was indeed uncertain, the future to some 
degree indefinite; but as regarded any fairly distant 
date, anything like a term of years, from the first there 
had been no doubt at all ; he would be no longer here. 
Meantime it was like a delightful few days' additional 
holiday from school, with which perforce one must be 
content at last ; or as though he had not been pardoned 
on that terrible morning, but only reprieved for two or 
three years. Yet how large a proportion they would 
have seemed in the whole sura of his years. He would 
have liked to lie finally in the garden among departed 
pets, dear dead dogs and horses; faintly proposes it 
one day ; but after a while comprehends the church- 
yard, with its white spots in the distant flowery view, 
as filling harmoniously its own proper place there. 
The weary soul seemed to be settling deeper into the 
body and the earth it came of, into the condition of the 
flovrers, the grass, proper creatures of the earth to 
which he is returning. The saintly vicar visits him 
p 



210 EMERALD UTHWART 

considerately ; is repelled with politeness ; goes on his 
way pondering inwardly what kind of place there might 
be, in any possible scheme of another world, for so 
absolutely unspiritual a subject. In fact, as the breath 
of the infinite world came about him, he clung all 
the faster to the beloved finite things still in contact 
with him ; he had successfully hidden from his eyes 
all beside. 

His reprieve however lasted long enough, after all, 
for a certain change of opinion of immense weight to 
him — a revision or reversal of judgment. It came 
about in this way. When peace was arranged, with 
question of rewards, pensions, and the like, certain 
battles or incidents therein were fought over again, 
sometimes in the highest places of debate. On such 
an occasion a certain speaker cites the case of 
Lieutenant James Stokes and another, as being 
" pessimi exempli^\- whereupon a second speaker gets 
up, prepared with full detail, insists, brings that inci- 
dental matter to the front for an hour, tells his 
unfortunate friend's story so effectively, pathetically, 
that, as happens with our countrymen, they repent. 
The matter gets into the newspapers, and, coming 
thus into sympathetic public view, something like 
glory wins from Emerald Uthwart his last touch of 
animation. Just not too late he received the offer 
of a commission; kept the letter there open within 
sight. Aldy, who "never shed tears and was in- 
capable of pain," in his great physical weakness, 
wept — shall we say for the second time in his life ? 
A less excitement would have been more favourable 



EMERALD UTHWART 211 

to any chance there might be of the patient's sur- 
viving. In fact the old gun-shot wound, wrongly 
thought to be cured, which had caused the one illness 
of his life, is now drawing out what remains of it, as he 
feels with a kind of odd satisfaction and pride — his 
old glorious wound ! And then, as of old, an absolute 
submissiveness comes over him, as he gazes round at 
the place, the relics of his uniform, the letter lying 
there. It was as if there was nothing more that could 
be said. Accounts thus settled, he stretched himself 
in the bed he had occupied as a boy, more completely 
at his ease than since the day when he had left home 
for the first time. Respited from death once, he was 
twice believed to be dead before the date actually 
registered on his tomb. " What will it matter a hun- 
dred years hence?" they used to ask by way of simple 
comfort in boyish troubles at school, overwhelming 
at the moment. Was that in truth part of a certain 
revelation of the inmost truth of things to "babes," 
such as we have heard of? What did it matter — the 
gifts, the good-fortune, its terrible withdrawal, the long 
agony? Emerald Uthwart would have been all but 
a centenarian to-day. 



Postscript, from the Diary of a Surgeon, 
August — th, 1 8 — . 

I was summoned by letter into the country to per- 
form an operation on the dead body of a young man, 
formerly an officer in the army. The cause of death 
is held to have been some kind of distress of mind, 



212 EMERALD UTHWART 

concurrent with the effects of an old gun-shot wound, 
the ball still remaining somewhere in the body. My 
instructions were to remove this, at the express desire, 
as I understood, of the deceased, rather than to ascer- 
tain the precise cause of death. This however became 
apparent in the course of my search for the ball, which 
had enveloped itself in the muscular substance in the 
region of the heart, and was removed with difficulty. 
I have known cases of this kind, where anxiety has 
caused incurable cardiac derangement (the deceased 
seems to have been actually sentenced to death for 
some military olfence when on service in Flanders), and 
such mental strain would of course have been aggra- 
vated by the presence of a foreign object in that 
place. On arriving at my destination, a small village 
in a remote part of Sussex, I proceeded through the 
little orderly churchyard, where however the monthly 
roses were blooming all their o^vn way among the 
formal white marble monuments of the wealthier 
people of the neighbourhood. At one of these the 
masons were at work, picking and chipping in the 
otherwise absolute stillness of the summer afternoon. 
They were in fact opening the family burial-place of 
the people who summoned me hither ; and the work- 
men pointed out their abode, conspicuous on the slope 
beyond, towards which I bent my steps accordingly. 
I was conducted to a large upper room or attic, set 
freely open to sun and air, and found the body lying 
in a cofnn, almost hidden under very rich-scented cut 
flowers, after a manner I have never seen in this 
country, except in the case of one or two Catholics 



EMERALD UTHWART 213 

laid out for burial. Tiie mother of the deceased was 
present, and actually assisted my operations, amid 
such tokens of distress, though perfectly self-controlled, 
as I fervently hope I may never witness again. De- 
ceased was in his twenty- seventh year, but looked 
many years younger ; had indeed scarcely yet reached 
the full condition of manhood. The extreme purity of 
the outlines, both of the face and limbs, was such as is 
usually found only in quite early youth ; the brow es- 
pecially, under an abundance of fair hair, finely formed, 
not high, but arched and full, as is said to be the way 
with those who have the imaginative temper in excess. 
Sad to think that had he lived reason must have 
deserted that so worthy abode of it ! I was struck by 
the great beauty of the organic developments, in the 
strictly anatomic sense ; those of the throat and 
diaphragm in particular might have been modelled 
for a teacher of normal physiology, or a professor of 
design. The flesh was still almost as firm as that 
of a living person ; as happens when, as in this case, 
death comes to all intents and purposes as gradually 
as in old age. This expression of health and life, 
under my seemingly merciless doings, together with 
the mother's distress, touched me to a degree very 
unusual, I conceive, in persons of my years and pro- 
fession. Though I believed myself to be acting by 
his express wish, I felt like a criminal. The ball, 
a small one, much corroded with blood, was at length 
removed ; and I was then directed to wrap it in 
a partly-printed letter, or other document, and place 
it in the breast-pocket of a faded and much-worn 



214 EMERALD UTHWART 

scarlet soldier's coat, put over the shirt which envel- 
oped the body. The flowers were then hastily 
replaced, the hands and the peak of the handsome 
nose remaining visible among them ; the wind ruffled 
the fair hair a little ; the lips were still red. I shall 
not forget it. The lid was then placed on the cofiin 
and screwed down in my presence. There was no 
plate or other inscription upon it. 



DIAPHANEITE 

There are some unworldly types of character which 
the world is able to estimate. It recognises certain 
moral types, or categories, and regards whatever falls 
within them as having a right to exist. The saint, the 
artist, even the speculative thinker, out of the world's 
order as they are, yet work, so far as they work at all, 
in and by means of the main current of the world's 
energy. Often it gives them late, or scanty, or mis- 
taken acknowledgment ; still it has room for them in 
its scheme of life, a place made ready for them in its 
affections. It is also patient of doctrinaires of every 
degree of littleness. As if dimly conscious of some 
great sickness and weariness of heart in itself, it turns 
readily to those who theorise about its unsoundness. 
To constitute one of these categories, or types, a 
breadth and generality of character is required. There 
is another type of character, which is not broad and 
general, rare, precious above all to the artist, a char- 
acter which seems to have been the supreme moral 
charm in the Beatrice of the Commedia. It does not 
take the eye by breadth of colour; rather it is that 
fine edge of light, where the elements of our moral 
215 



216 DIAPHANEITE 

nature refine themselves to the burning point. It 
crosses rather than follows the main current of the 
world's life. The world has no sense fine enough for 
those evanescent shades, which fill up the blanks 
between contrasted types of character — dehcate pro- 
vision in the organisation of the moral world for the 
transmission to every part of it of the life quickened 
at single points ! For this nature there is no place 
ready in its affections. This colourless, unclassified 
purity of life it can neither use for its service, nor 
contemplate as an ideal. 

"Sibi unitus et simplificatus esse," that is the long 
struggle of the Imitatio Christi. The spirit which it 
forms is the very opposite of that which regards hfe 
as a game of skill, and values things and persons as 
marks or counters of something to be gained, or 
achieved, beyond them. It seeks to value everything 
at its eternal worth, not adding to it, or taking from 
it, the amount of influence it may have for or against 
its own special scheme of life. It is the spirit that 
sees external circumstances as they are, its ov/n power 
and tendencies as they are, and realises the given 
conditions of its life, not disquieted by the desire for 
change, or the preference of one i^art in life rather 
than another, or passion, or opinion. The character 
we mean to indicate achieves this perfect life by a 
happy gift of nature, without any struggle at all. 
Not the saint only, the artist also, and the speculative 
thinker, confused, jarred, disintegrated in the world, 
as sometimes they inevitably are, aspire for this 
simplicity to the last. The struggle of this aspi- 



DIAPHANEITE 217 

ration with a lower practical aim in the mind of 
Savonarola has been subtly traced by the author of 
Romola. As language, expression, is the function 
of intellect, as art, the supreme expression, is the 
highest product of intellect, so this desire for sim- 
plicity is a kind of indirect self-assertion of the intel- 
lectual part of such natures. Simplicity in purpose 
and act is a kind of determinate expression in 
dexterous outline of one's personality. It is a kind 
of moral expressiveness ; there is an intellectual tri- 
umph implied in it. Such a simplicity is character- 
istic of the repose of perfect intellectual culture. 
The artist and he who has treated life in the spirit 
of art desires only to be shown to the v>^orld as he 
really is ; as he comes nearer and nearer to perfection, 
the veil of an outer life not simply expressive of the 
inward becomes thinner and thinner. This intellect- 
ual throne is rarely won. Like the religious life, it 
is a paradox in the world, denying the first conditions 
of man's ordinary existence, cutting obliquely the 
spontaneous order of things. But the character we 
have before us is a kind of prophecy of this repose 
and simplicity, coming as it were in the order of 
grace, not of nature, by some happy gift, or accident 
of birth or constitution, showing that it is indeed 
within the limits of man's destiny. Like all the 
higher forms of inv/ard life this character is a subtle 
blending and interpenetration of intellectual, moral 
and spiritual elements. But it is as a phase of intellect, 
of culture, that it is most striking and forcible. It 
is a mind of taste lighted up by some spiritual ray 



218 DIAPHANEITfi 

within. What is meant by taste is an imperfect intel- 
lectual state ; it is but a sterile kind of culture. It 
is the mental attitude, the intellectual manner of 
perfect culture, assumed by a happy instinct. Its 
beautiful way of handling everything that appeals 
to the senses and the intellect is really directed by 
the laws of the higher intellectual life, but while 
culture is able to trace those laws, mere taste is 
unaware of them. In the character before us, taste, 
without ceasing to be instructive, is far more than 
a mental attitude or manner. A magnificent in- 
tellectual force is latent within it. It is like the 
reminiscence of a forgotten culture that once adorned 
the mind ; as if the mind of one ^iXoo-oc^T/oras ttotc 
fier €p(OTo<i, fallen into a new cycle, were beginning 
its spiritual progress over again, but with a certain 
power of anticipating its stages. It has the freshness 
without the shallowness of taste, the range and seri- 
ousness of culture without its strain and over-con- 
sciousness. Such a habit may be described as 
wistfulness of mind, the feeling that there is " so 
much to know," rather as a longing after what is 
unattainable, than as a hope to apprehend. Its 
ethical result is an intellectual guilelessness, or in- 
tegrity, that instinctively prefers what is direct and 
clear, lest one's own confusion and intransparency 
should hinder the transmission from without of light 
that is not yet inward. He who is ever looking for 
the breaking of a light he knows not whence about 
him, notes with a strange heedfulness the faintest 
paleness in the sky. That truthfulness of temper, 



DIAPHANEITE 219 

that receptivity, which professors often strive in vain 
to form, is engendered here less by wisdom than by 
innocence. Such a character is Uke a reUc from the 
classical age, laid open by accident to our alien 
modern atmosphere. It has something of the clear 
ring, the eternal outline of the antique. Perhaps it 
is nearly always found with a corresponding outward 
semblance. The veil or mask of such a nature would 
be the very opposite of the " dim blackguardism " of 
Danton, the type Carlyle has made too popular for 
the true interest of art. It is just this sort of entire 
transparency of nature that lets through unconsciously 
all that is really lifegiving in the established order 
of things; it detects without difficulty all sorts of 
affinities between its own elements, and the nobler 
elements in that order. But then its wistfulness and 
a confidence in perfection it has makes it love the 
lords of change. What makes revolutionists is 
either self-pity, or indignation for the sake of others, 
or a sympathetic perception of the dominant under- 
current of progress in things. The nature before us 
is revolutionist from the direct sense of personal 
worth, that x*^'^^* ^^^^ pride of life, which to the 
Greek was a heavenly grace. How can he value 
what comes of accident, or usage, or convention, 
whose individual life nature itself has isolated and 
perfected ? Revolution is often impious. They who 
prosecute revolution have to violate again and again 
the instinct of reverence. That is inevitable, since 
after all progress is a kind of violence. But in this 
nature revolutionism is softened, harmonised, subdued 



220 DIAPHANEITE 

as by distance. It is the revolutionism of one who 
has slept a hundred years. Most of us are neutralised 
by the play of circumstances. To most of us only 
one chance is given in the life of the spirit and the 
intellect, and circumstances prevent our dexterously 
seizing that one chance. The one happy spot in our 
nature has no room to burst into life. Our collective 
life, pressing equally on every part of every one of 
us, reduces nearly all of us to the level of a colour- 
less uninteresting existence. Others are neutralised, 
not by suppression of gifts, but by just equipoise 
among them. In these no single gift, or virtue, or 
idea, has an unmusical predominance. The world 
easily confounds these two conditions. It sees in 
the character before us only indifferentism. Doubt- 
less the chief vein of the life of humanity could 
hardly pass through it. Not by it could the prog- 
ress of the world be achieved. It is not the guise 
of Luther or Spinoza ; rather it is that of Raphael, who 
in the midst of the Reformation and the Renaissance, 
himself lighted up by them, yielded himself to neither, 
but stood still to live upon himself, even in outward 
form a youth, almost an infant, yet surprising all the 
world. The beauty of the Greek statues was a sexless 
beauty ; the statues of the gods had the least traces 
of sex. Here there is a moral sexlessness, a kind of 
impotence, an ineffectual wholeness of nature, yet with 
a divine beauty and significance of its own. 

Over and over again the world has been surprised 
by the heroism, the insight, the passion, of this clear 
crystal nature. Poetry and poetical history have 



DIAPHANEITE 221 

dreamed of a crisis, where it must needs be that 
some human victim be sent down into the grave. 
These are :hey whom in its profound emotion hu- 
manity might choose to send. " What," says Carlyle, 
of Charlotte Corday, " What if she had emerged from 
her secluded stillness, suddenly like a star; cruel- 
lovely, with half-angelic, half-daemonic splendour ; to 
gleam for a moment, and in a moment be extin- 
guished ; to be held in memory, so bright complete 
was she, through long centuries ! " 

Often the presence of this nature is felt like a sweet 
aroma in early manhood. Afterwards, as the adul- 
terated atmosphere of the world assimilates us to itself, 
the savour of it faints away. Perhaps there are 
flushes of it in all of us ; recurring moments of it 
in every period of life. Certainly this is so with 
every man of genius. It is a thread of pure white 
light that one might disentwine from the tumultuary 
richness of Goethe's nature. It is a natural prophecy 
of what the next generation will appear, renerved, 
modified by the ideas of this. There is a violence, 
an impossibility about men who have ideas, which 
makes one suspect that they could never be the 
type of any widespread life. Society could not be 
conformed to their image but by an unlovely strain- 
ing from its true order. Well, in this nature the 
idea appears softened, harmonised as by distance, 
with an engaging naturalness, without the noise of 
axe or hammer. 

People have often tried to find a type of life that 
might serve as a basement type. The philosopher, 



222 DIAPHANEITE 

the saint, the artist, neither of them can be this 
type ; the order of nature itself makes them ex- 
ceptional. It cannot be the pedant, or the con- 
servative, or anything rash and irreverent. Also the 
type must be one discontented with society as it is. 
The nature here indicated alone is worthy to be this 
type. A majority of such would be the regeneration 
of the world. 

July, 1864. 



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